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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 27, 2007
Handguns Are Completely Illegal In Britain Hence this piece of news: Guns were used in 4,120 robberies last year - a 10% jump - including a 9% rise to 1,439 in the number of street robberies where guns were used.Oh, and here's the official spin: Home Office minister Tony McNulty said: "Firearm offences have fallen significantly, by 14% in the year up to September 2006, which amounts to 1,642 fewer incidents.Firearms offenses have fallen significantly--but firearms robberies have gone up by 10%? Does this mean that strictly gun control offenses are in decline, because the government has made it clear that it will vigorously prosecute those who wish to protect themselves with a gun, but gun crimes with victims have increased? Idaho Homelessness I mentioned in a recent posting about unsheltered homeless vs. those who have shelter. An unsheltered homeless person is living in a car, under a bridge, or perhaps just under the open sky. Under the best of weather conditions, this is utter misery. A homeless person with shelter is far better off. Ridenbaugh Press gives a bit more detail about the recent report showing Idaho with the sixth highest homelessness rate in the country: The new report on homelessness from the National Alliance to End Homelessness has, as a number of regional news stories have indicated, state breakdowns on estimates of the homeless population.Even being a sheltered homeless person isn't great, especially in those large shelters where everyone shares a single large room. Still, it does suggest that Idaho is at least providing minimal shelter for nearly all its homeless--something that can't be said for Washington and Oregon. Where Slavery Reparations Take Us I've mentioned in the past the idea that if slavery reparations survived in the courts, there would be a vast swarm of lawsuits filed for other past wrongs. Classical Values brought to my attention this website which may be of interest, amusement, or amazement. The petition says: We, the undersigned citizens of the world, demand reparations payments of £31,960,000,000,000 from the British Monarchy and government of the United Kingdom. This money will compensate us for the profound injuries we have suffered over the last 500 years from British brutality, negligence, malevolence, crimes against humanity, and other heinous and atrocious forms of misrule. It is far from enough to make us whole, but a necessary first step in the long process of British coming to terms with its historical guilty and reconciling itself with global opinion and international law.I suppose I should see if the websites www.GermanicTribesReparations.com and www.CroMagnonManWrongedNeanderthals.com are taken. Friday, January 26, 2007
What I Said At The Boise Planning and Zoning Commission Last Monday I am absolutely convinced that I have already blogged this, but there's no evidence for it, and none of my readers have seen it, so I must have just dreamed it. I showed up a bit early for the Boise Planning and Zoning Commission hearing concerning the attempts to shut down the Salvation Army's shelter for homeless families, the Booth Home. This provided an opportunity to talk to some of the members of what calls itself the "Booth Neighbors." My stereotypes of this North End neighborhood were confirmed as I left the elevator; some of those coming to shut down the Booth Home were saying that it was hard to decide whether to go hear Al Gore talk about global warming, or to do this, but obviously, shutting down a homeless shelter took priority. A little background: the Salvation Army has operated a facility at this location on 24th Street in what is now the fashionable North End of Boise since 1921. This was not a problem, because Boise did not have a zoning law until 1965. In 1969, the Salvation Army obtained a Conditional Use Permit to operate a residence and school for unwed mothers at this location, because this was a non-conforming use within the R1C zone. Until 1985, the Booth House was used for unwed mothers, many of them teenagers, but in those unenlightened times, even single adult women needed somewhere to go to have their illegitimate child away from the attention of their neighbors. In 1985, the Salvation Army found that the demand for unwed mother shelter had declined enough that they begin to use it as a homeless shelter, at least on a sporadic basis, along with administrative offices, and as a drop-off point for contributions, and for a food pantry for the hungry. In 2005, in response to requests from the City of Boise, the Salvation Army established what they call an "intact family homeless shelter" at this facility which occupies an entire block in a very nice, leafy tree suburban neighborhood. To stay at this facility, you need to be one of the following: 1. Mom with kids. 2. Dad with kids. 3. Mom and Dad with kids. They do not allow Mom and her current boyfriend to stay there. They aren't as strict now as they used to be about being married, but the man has to be the biological father of the kids to stay there. Additional requirements: 1. Background checks to make sure that you aren't a registered sex offender. 2. No drugs, alcohol, or tobacco are allowed. 3. You must be seeking employment. They have counselors there (such as my daughter) who work on assisting the adults in finding employment, working on budgeting, seeking psychological help if needed, and so on. 4. You can stay a maximum of 90 days while you use your paychecks to build up a nest egg, with which you go find a place of your own--thus freeing up that space for another intact homeless family. The complaints from the Booth (Bad) Neighbors were basically these: 1. Lots of crime problems in the neighborhood since the intact family shelter opened in 2005. Interestingly enough, when I asked some of the complainers if they had statistics on the amount of crime in the area, especially anything that would demonstrate a statistically significant increase, they had nothing. They claimed that the police department could not provide that sort of information. This startles me, but not too much. In the words of Professor John McCarthy of Stanford, "He who will not do math is doomed to talk nonsense." 2. The Baby Boomers who showed up for this effort talked a lot about the crime problems of people from the shelter or the boyfriends who were passed out in their front yards, in the middle of the street, urinating on their lawns, sleeping in cars around the Booth House--but when one of the members of the Commission asked one of the complainers about calls to the police, her response was quite interesting. First she said, "We called the police" and then immediately launched into a tirade about how when she called the Planning Department's Code Enforcement division to "do something" about the Booth House, they told her that they couldn't do anything. You might almost get the impression that the crime problems in the neighborhood weren't serious enough to call the police--but serious enough to call Code Enforcement? Why do I find myself wondering how honest these people were? 3. I noticed that several of those complaining always discussed the increase in problems immediately after mentioning the 2005 newspaper coverage of the Salvation Army's creation of the intact family homeless shelter. This leads to the interesting question: did coverage of this cause them to start seeing a pattern of problems after they became aware of the shelter? Sometimes that happens; we see scattered events, and once we have an explanation, those events form a pattern. And sometimes those scattered events form a pattern only in our own minds, once we have been made fearful. 4. The Planning Director had previously decided that while the nature of the services that Salvation Army provides at Booth House are not dramatically different than 1969, when the current Conditional Use Permit was issued, he did say that the Salvation Army needed to request a modification to the CUP to cover the changing characteristics of the population there. The Booth (Bad) Neighbors insist that it should be completely prohibited; that what the Salvation Army was doing there was really a hotel, except one where no money changes hands. Here's my remarks to the Planning and Zoning Commission: It should take a very compelling reason to tell a private property owner that an existing use--one that goes back decades (although in somewhat different form)--is no longer allowed. When that use servers a clear public purpose, such as temporary homeless family shelter--a change should require very compelling reasons.One of the official presenters of the Booth (Bad) Neighbors showed some statistics that he said came from HUD about homeless people. I don't find the numbers startling, with high rates of mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, and recurrent homelessness. I don't remember exactly what I said, because I hadn't prepared for this, but I did point out (before my time ran out) that there is significant regional variation in homeless populations with respect to mental illness. I mentioned that a survey of unsheltered homeless people in Idaho suggested that about 14% were mentally ill (or at least receiving disability payments for that reason). Things are different on the coasts, when rates of mental illness seem to be higher. Had I enough time, I would also have pointed out that the combination of the screening process that Booth House uses, and that this is an intact family facility, probably filters out many of the substance abusers and the most seriously mentally ill. My impression of the North End as a bunch of spoiled aging hippies, looking out for their interests, has only been reinforced by this experience. As I mentioned earlier: My daughter tells me that the meeting didn't end until past 1:00 AM. The Commission voted 5-0 to reject the appeal by the Booth Neighbors (who wanted the shelter completely shut down) and voted 3-2 to uphold the Planning Director's decision that the Salvation Army needs to file for a modification to the Conditional Use Permit issued in 1969 to keep operating. Welding Steel or Aluminum I have been making my caster assembly goodies sold under the ScopeRoller name out of various plastics, mostly because they are easy for me to machine and assemble at home. I have had a sudden revelation of a way to greatly simplify and speed up manufacturing--if I can weld two pieces of metal together, one a tube (cut at a 30 degree angle) and one a flat. The 30 degree cut end of the tube would be welded to the flat. I must now ask some questions that are embarrassing because my father's third career was...welder. 1. If I were to buy a welding machine, how difficult is it to become proficient at this? I always got the impression that "welder" was a somewhat skilled job, requiring considerable practice to produce both attractive and durable welds. 2. If I were to send out pieces of metal to be welded together, how much might I expect to spend to have two pieces of steel welded together, where the total area being joined is about six inches circumference, and less than an eighth inch across (where the cut tube meets the flat)? 3. My recollection from talks with my father is that welding aluminum requires a different technique, known as "heliarc" because you have to weld aluminum in a helium atmosphere. Would having someone weld aluminum be substantially more expensive than having someone weld steel? 4. Is welding stainless steeel substantially more expensive than welding carbon steel? GM Worried About Falling Gasoline Prices Yes, really and truly! This article from the Wall Street Journal reports that GM's chairman is terribly concerned that dropping gasoline prices will take away incentives for buyers to snap up GM's new, more efficient vehicles: If fuel prices are too low, particularly relative to the incomes of new car buyers, there's less economic rationale for paying a premium to own a high-tech, fuel-saving car. GM's North American auto business is fighting to break even as it is. Mr. Wagoner hardly needs to lose more money pushing expensive alternative technology vehicles, such as a production version of the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt that anchored GM's publicity blitz earlier this month at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.Along with what I consider flash-in-the-pan things like hybrids and electric vehicles, GM is pushing fuel cell technology--and a lot of evolutionary improvements in existing vehicles. For example, GM will be offering a six-speed automatic transmission in the Chevrolet Equinox, Chevrolet Malibu, and Pontiac G6 in 2008. My wife's 2005 Equinox has a five-speed automatic, and that is part of why such a heavy vehicle (3700 pounds) has both substantial guts and still pretty respectable mileage (18 or so around town; 23 to 24 on the highway). The more forward gears you have, the more you can take advantage of the optimum efficiency of the engine. That's part of why big trucks have 10 or 15 forward gears--a diesel engine has a maximum efficiency in a fairly narrow RPM band, and with a big truck, you need all the help you can get. The benefit will small vehicles (especially gasoline engines) isn't as dramatic, but there's still a gain from this--and GM is not the only maker that has developed multiple forward gear ever. Lexus, for example, has introduced an eight-speed automatic, and Mercedes uses a seven-speed automatic on some cars. More Moon Shots This is a picture that I took at prime focus last night with the 8" f/7 reflector, so you get the quarter Moon. Labels: astrophotography, telescopes "Draw The Graph, Then Plot the Points" When I took biology from Mr. Campman at Santa Monica High, this was a joke. Apparently it isn't a joke, but a policy at the IPCC (the group that is supposed to be telling us whether anthropogenic global warming is a problem). The blogger Climate Audit points to an amazing statement in the IPCC's procedures for final revision of their report on page 4): Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter.What this means is that if there's a discrepancy between what the scientists have found, and what the "Summary for Policymakers" says--we change the scientific reports to match the summary. What if a scientist finds clear evidence that global warming is 100% caused by solar changes? It appears that he is supposed to "correct" his paper to match the conclusions. I've commented before about how AGW has become a religion, with threats of excommunication for heretics, and proposals for Nuremberg-style trials for AGW deniers. Now, we have a direct statement that the "Summary for Policymakers" takes precedence over the science--adjusting the data points to fit the graph. Environmentalism is a religion, with all the worst dangers of a religion--and none of its saving graces. Labels: global warming Rent-A-Mob Ann Althouse points to this amazing BBC story about political demonstrators for rent: They refuse to rally for neo-Nazis, but as long as the price is right a new type of German mercenary will take to the streets and protest for you. Crimes That No Gun Control Law Can Fix This has been a gruesome week in the Boise area--crimes that no gun control law has any hope of fixing. The first case involves two murder victims who were tortured with an ax. The accused, from the police reports, sounds like he is mentally ill: Brent Eugene High, 26, apparently the stepbrother of one of the victims, was found wandering naked near the home Wednesday morning, and comments by High led police to the scene, where officers found two bodies and a bloody ax, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by the Statesman. High is charged with two counts of first-degree murder.The other story doesn't identify the weapon, but the description pretty clearly excludes a gun: A 16-year-old boy is charged with killing his mother while she slept in their modest South Bench home early Thursday — Boise's first homicide of 2007.Here's a relatively positive news story about two kids in minor trouble whose confrontation with evil has apparently opened their eyes: Cody Lovell and Chad Johnson said they were biking down a familiar alley shortcut Wednesday afternoon when a boy jumped in front of them and asked them what they were doing. Thursday, January 25, 2007
M-O-O-N: That Spells Moon If you read Stephen King's The Stand, you know what I'm talking about! The rest of you just need to read it! I took these with my Pentax K10D, and an 18mm Orthoscopic eyepiece projection setup, used the HP Photosmart Premiere program to do some very basic adjustments for sharpness, sometimes for brightness and contrast, and then cut them down to a size that wouldn't take forever to download. I still haven't quite reached the sharpness that I want, but better than last night, when the quivering atmosphere made focus for more hundredths of a second darn near impossible. Click on each link to see the picture. 1/45th second, ASA 1600 1/60th, ASA 1600 1/90th, ASA 1600 1/90th, ASA 400 1/45th, ASA 400 1/20th, ASA 400 1/10th, ASA 400 1/10th, ASA 100 1/6th, ASA 100 1/3 sec., ASA 100 Labels: astrophotography Odd That I Haven't Seen Much Media Attention To This Nor have I seen any mention on the various law blogs about this major criminal case indicting one of America's biggest law firms. I've never held a high opinion of William Lerach, one of the participants in this scandal, whose specialty has been suing corporations after their stock goes down, claiming that they officers had withheld information to mislead investors. I'm not saying that there aren't such situations, but my impression was always that Lerach was suing everytime a company's stock fell--and this article from Fortune makes it clear that Lerach and the other principals involved in these suits, were engaged in highly dishonest practices to file these suits: (Fortune Magazine) -- For decades, few things have inspired as much fear and loathing in the executive suites of corporate America as the law firm of Milberg Weiss and the two outsized personalities who ruled the place, Mel Weiss and Bill Lerach. Through creativity and ruthlessness, they transformed the humble securities class-action lawsuit into a deadly weapon.It is a very long article, well worth reading, just because the personalities involved are a rogue's gallery of what I have long suspected many plaintiff's attorneys to be: greedy; dishonest; immoral; and stupid. Oh yeah, and big contributors to the Democratic Party. The case started with a domestic violence call, which soon led to a stolen Picasso and Monet--which were not really stolen, so that an opthamologist to the stars could claim the insurance money: By July 12,1992, when Dr. Cooperman first reported the theft of the Monet and Picasso from his Brentwood home, he had already served as lead plaintiff in dozens of Milberg Weiss lawsuits. "Lead plaintiff" status made Cooperman the official representative of a class of investors in a company, and required him to convince a judge that his claims of stock market losses were "typical" of the group.The whole story is fascinating, and we learn that Lerach and fellow ambulance-chasers are extortionists in suits (which surprises me not in the least). This really captures the sort of lawyer that Lerach is: Plaintiffs firms are paid on contingency, as much as 30% of whatever they win, and Weiss - unlike most plaintiffs lawyers, who settled fast and cheap - was willing to go into debt to press a case for years in search of a bigger payoff.And the personal morals of the creeps involved are just horrifying: Weiss, who'd viewed the issue as a bargaining chip with prosecutors, vowed he wouldn't make them go. After the meeting, still clinging to hope of avoiding the firm's indictment, some partners began collecting petition signatures to forcibly remove Bershad and Schulman under a never-used provision of the partnership agreement that allowed two-thirds of those holding an equity stake to oust a partner. But before the rebellious partners got the necessary signatures, Bershad announced he was taking a leave of absence on May 16. Schulman would soon follow.As I said, well worth reading in full. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Democratically-controlled Congress pass a law making most of these crimes lawful. Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The Results of the Boise Planning and Zoning Commission Hearing I could have sworn that I posted what happened when I went to the hearing Monday night--but it seems to have vanished from my blog, and I don't know why. My daughter tells me that the meeting didn't end until past 1:00 AM. The Commission voted 5-0 to reject the appeal by the Booth Neighbors (who wanted the shelter completely shut down) and voted 3-2 to uphold the Planning Director's decision that the Salvation Army needs to file for a modification to the Conditional Use Permit issued in 1969 to keep operating. For those who read my remarks there (assuming that I didn't just imagine that I blogged them here), and wondered why I focused on the negative consequences to the city--rather than the negative consequences to the families that currently or will in the future live there--it's really quite simple. If you want people to do something, you can either appeal to their concern for others, or to their self-interest. Which do you think is a more reliable motivator? Trip Plans DATE: February 12, 2007 TIME: 3:30pm PLACE: Moot Courtroom School of Law Hamline University 1536 Hewitt Avenue St. Paul, MN 55104 Click here for map. DESCRIPTION: Clayton Cramer Author of the new book Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie will discuss his work on the development of America's gun culture. DATE: February 13, 2007 TIME: 6:00 PM LOCATION: See here. DESCRIPTION: Lessons (and some amusing stories) from American history concerning both possession and carrying of guns, with an emphasis on Maryland history. DATE: February 14, 2007 TIME: 7:00 PM Monocacy Pistol Club LOCATION: See here. DESCRIPTION: Lessons from American history concerning both possession and carrying of guns, with an emphasis on Maryland history. DATE: February 15, 2007 TIME: 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM LOCATION: The Jim Bohannon Show, on WTWP 1500 AM in Washington, DC; click here to see what station will be carrying the show where you live. DATE: February 16, 2007 TIME: 10:45 AM to 11:30 PM LOCATION: G. Gordon Liddy's show. I can't find out which station carries it in the DC area, but go here and you can get details about which satellite radio stations carry it. DATE: February 16, 2007 TIME: 5:00 PM LOCATION: Books-A-Million, 11 Dupont Circle NW, Washington DC CLick here for a map. DESCRIPTION: Short lecture in the cafe, followed by a chance for you to buy my book and get it autographed by the author signing. Please don't leave me standing there alone, looking silly! Or perhaps I should be optimistic: please, let's all take public transportation there so that we don't cause gridlock! There will be a second trip to New Jersey/New York City probably a couple of weeks later to do some more media and some more events. Should I Be Happy They Are Saying The Pledge? Or upset about what language they are saying it in? NAMPA - "If I had a 'Patriot for Vasquez' award I would give it to her," said former Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez of Chandra Carlson. Carlson is a Centennial Elementary 5th grader who decided not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the rest of her classmates in Spanish and German.This is here in Idaho--not California, or one of the other places where multiculturalism is today's fad. Nigerian Scammers For a very long time, the Nigerian scammers pretended to be African bank officials, government bureaucrats, or widows and orphans of recently ousted dictators. Lately, they have been pretending to be British bank officials or government bureaucrats--where the British English that they can almost write sounds half plausible. In the last year or so, the Nigerian scammers are pretending to be American soldiers who have come into a windfall, and need our help smuggling the money back to the U.S. Of course, even the most polished of these letters are still obviously written not by Americans, but by people who learned British English. Here's an example that I received this morning: Good DayI'm not going to pick out all the signs of having learned British English, not American English, but it is obvious that this guy is a fraud. And yet there Americans who get taken in by these frauds all the time! Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Big Bertha's Optical Problems I mentioned a day or two ago that part of the problem that Big Bertha has for astrophotography is also a problem visually: the focuser that came on it is coarse. In addition, I can't get the focuser to rack in quite far enough for prime focus photography, so I am thinking of buying Moonlite Telescope's CR2 dual rate Crayford focuser. The racked in height of my current focuser is 4.5"; for the CR2, it is 1.45". The extra 3.05" will let me get the focal point well inside the camera body. The downside is that I will need the longest drawtube (the 2.75" one) to get back to where I am now with eyepieces--which means that I will probably need to use an extension tube in the focuser to get most eyepieces to focus visually. I have one, but it is a little clumsy. However: what effect does the shorter focuser have on the rest of the optical path? I use Dale Keller's newtwin program (a Newtonian optical layout program for Windows) for this sort of thing--and I notice that it tells me that the current diagonal mirror is far larger than it needs to be for the current antique focuser. The diagonal mirror's minor axis is 4.25"; 3.5" is sufficient. The extra aperture both impairs resolution, and light gathering capacity, because it is blocking incoming light from hitting the primary. With the lower profile CR2 focuser, I could reduce the diagonal to 2.8" minor axis, probably improving both the brightness of images a bit, and improving resolution. I suspect also that the diagonal contained in Big Bertha was whatever the people who made it found available for the lowest price, and a well-made diagonal might improve image quality slightly as well. One thing at a time: first the focuser (which is the expensive part); then the diagonal (and sell the old one to someone who is building a 20" or 25" reflector). If there are continuing improvements in performance, it might justify replacing Big Bertha's overweight and overly large tube with something a bit more reasonably sized. Labels: telescopes How Many Times Does Someone Have to Say, "I'm Going to Kill You" Before You Take Them Seriously? Here's the completely unveiled threat: Israel and the United States will soon be destroyed, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday during a meeting with Syria's foreign minister, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) website said in a report.Here's the mechanism: North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.Does Iran have the capacity to destroy the U.S.? Not now, and probably not ever. But it is likely that within five years, they will have the capacity to kill millions of Americans, cause trillions of dollars in damages, and (unless Dennis Kucinich is in power) force the U.S. to engage in massive nuclear retaliation. If you want to know why I consider the Democrats so dangerous, it isn't because most Democrats in Congress would tolerate a nuclear Iran. It is because the Democratic Party needs to keep making the multimillionaire leftist wing of the Party happy--and so they spend a lot of time coddling people like Michael Moore. This unintentionally sending the message to Iran that much of America lacks the resolve to act when push comes to shove. The perception that America was too soft to defend itself after the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia is part of why Osama bin Laden pursued the course that he did. The unwillingness of France and Britain to push back when Germany remilitarized the Ruhrland in 1936 encouraged Hitler to believe that neither country was willing to go to war, and ditto when both countries acquiesced to the Austrian Anschluss and the carving up of Czechoslovakia. Iran is reading Democratic Party willingness to make Michael Moore and the rest of the multimillionaires happy as more signs that America has lost its resolve. By The Way, Since Readers Are Asking Me To Do This You can order my new book online at Barnes and Noble or from Books-A-Million. Apparently, a fair number of bookstores actually have it on the shelf. What Constitutes A Legitimate Basis For Discrimination? This news story reports on a newly graduated Muslim female police officer in Britain who apparently can't touch men, because it violates her religious beliefs: A Muslim woman police officer has sparked a new debate by refusing to shake hands with Britain's most senior police chief for religious reasons.Gee, you think? "Sir, you will have to handcuff yourself--my religious beliefs prevent me from touching you." I believe, from reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir of teaching literature while wearing a veil, that Muslim women are only allowed to touch father, brother, and husband. It sounds like this police officer is going to have a rather limited set of potential offenders that she can handcuff! It's All Pfizer's Fault! My wife finds the Viagra ads on television a bit offensive. I think they are reasonably tasteful--although I find myself wondering if such ads really need to be on television. Still, I find this latest complaint shows enormous chutzpah: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A major U.S. AIDS treatment group plans to file a lawsuit on Monday that accuses drug giant Pfizer Inc. of illegally promoting recreational use of its blockbuster impotence pill Viagra.What interest, you ask, does an AIDS group have in discouraging Viagra? This article copied from the New York Times discusses the fairly common problem of gay men mixing meth and Viagra: At a meeting on preventing sexually transmitted diseases, Dr. Samuel J. Mitchell of the San Francisco Health Department said a study had found that 17.4 percent of 1,263 gay men who had gone to the city's sexually transmitted disease clinic had used crystal in the four weeks before their visit. Crystal users were more than twice as likely as nonusers to be infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, 4.9 times as likely to receive a diagnosis of syphilis and 1.7 times as likely to test positive for gonorrhea. Why? Well, meth (like pseudoephedrine HCl, from which meth is made) causes an increase in blood pressure--causing impotence problems. So if you like to do meth, because it gives you energy, and makes you feel powerful--well, if you want to go to parties and have sex with complete strangers for hours on end--you need to take Viagra. I haven't seen any evidence that Pfizer is advertising Viagra in a way that is particularly dangerous. What is dangerous is the party boy subculture that thinks that meth is a fun drug to do, and therefore needs Viagra to make up for the nasty side effects of meth. In the early 1980s, the whining was that the government wasn't doing enough to stop AIDS. Then, by the mid-1980s, the complaint was that San Francisco, by shutting down the gay bathhouses, was denying gays the right to have a good time. Now the complaint is that Pfizer is inappropriately advertising Viagra--even though the 96-97% of the male population that is straight is unlikely to be at increased risk of AIDS from using Viagra. Here Is a Politically Very Incorrect Piece of Data I'll discuss the possible explanations for this afterwards, but Power and Control points to this Department of Justice report on characteristics of rape victims and rapists, broken down by race of victim and offender. This comes not from the Uniform Crime Reports, which suffer the problems associated with police departments perhaps not reporting all crimes, but the Crime Victimization surveys, where they sample a very large number of people, and ask them to report crimes that they have suffered in the last six months. This particular table involves single offender cases--one rapist, one victim. For white victims, 44.5% of rapists are white, 33.6% of rapists are black, 19.6% are "other" and 2.3% are "unknown" or the data is not available (presumably because the surveyor failed to mark the rapist's race). I'm not too surprised at the disproportionate percentage of blacks among the rapists, when you consider the disproportionate numbers of murders and robberies committed by blacks. For black victims, the numbers are startling: for black rape victims, 100% of the rapists are black. There is a footnote in the other columns that says, "Estimate is based on about 10 or fewer sample cases." I don't know exactly how large the sample was that they were using, and it doesn't jump out at me in the main report. In the past, these surveys have been large--typically 31,000 or so people, because you need a large sample to get data on what are, after all, relatively infrequent crimes. If they can't get a statistically significant number of black rape victims reporting non-black rapists--oh boy, that's quite an indictment of the state of black men, isn't it? Now, if this data came from crimes reported to police, you might suspect that black women aren't reporting rapes by whites and "others" out of a belief that they would not be believed. But the data comes from victim surveys--where one would presume that this isn't an issue. I can't imagine that black rape victims are going out of their way to avoid making white rapists look bad. A traditional problem with the victimization surveys is that when researchers have compared police reports of crimes involving survey participants to what participants in these surveys have reported, they find a tendency for less important crimes (small thefts, for example) to be unreported--apparently because victims forget them. This problem seems to be especially severe among poor people. But rape is hardly a minor crime, and it is hard to believe that black rape victims would forget rapes by whites, but not rapes by blacks. The alternative explanation is that there is very, very little rape of black women by white men. If you have any suggestions on why this is, let me know. Book Sales I ran into one of the managers of the local Borders the other night. He told me that he thought two of the five copies of my book had sold in the first week. Oh, goodie! I'll play environmentalist. "Let's see, 2/5 of their shipment sold out. That means 2/5 of everyone's shipment sold out throughout the U.S. If this rate of growth continues at exponential rates, I can retire in five weeks, buy out Microsoft in eighteen weeks, and subsequent printings of my book will consume the entire known mass of the universe by 2028." Monday, January 22, 2007
Global Warming Again A rare snowstorm in Arizona: PHOENIX (AP) -- More than a foot of snow fell on parts of northern Arizona, and several more inches were possible Monday, while children as far south as Tucson got a rare chance to play in the snow.Okay, that's just weather. But this article from the Houston Chronicle points out that it isn't just anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics who are concerned, but even those who think AGW is probably at least partly real: Scientists long have issued the warnings: The modern world's appetite for cars, air conditioning and cheap, fossil-fuel energy spews billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unnaturally warming the world.Even though the rest of the article fails to acknowledge that there are well-respected scientists who have good reasons to suspect that this is primarily the result of solar changes, it does recognize that there's some good reason to suspect that the uncertainties are being "lost" by scientists who are banging the AGW drum. Unfortunately, part of the difficulty is that there is a religious aspect to much of the AGW alarmism--hence the recent proposal to have the American Meteorological Society decertify members who engage in heresy, and the proposal for Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for AGW skeptics. These aren't the signs of a bunch that is confident that it has truth on its side. Labels: global warming Sunday, January 21, 2007
Moon Shots I shoveled the snow off the back driveway this evening to take advantage of a relatively clear night, and rolled out Big Bertha. Not being a motorized (or even motorizable) mount, taking astrophotographs with it is a bit optimistic, but I thought, maybe I can take some decent pictures of the Moon--it's bright, and Big Bertha has lots of aperture. 1. I couldn't do prime focus photography (where you use the telescope as the lens). The focal point of the mirror is too close to the end of the eyepiece focuser, and I can't get the focal point inside the bare camera body. This may be an argument for a lower profile focuser. 2. If I put a 3X Barlow lens in the focuser, it moves the focal point far enough out to get in focus--but just barely, and at the least inward travel of the focuser, it is too stiff to get an even slightly acceptable focus. 3. With eyepiece projection (telescope plus eyepiece combined to form a lens), I was able to get in focus--but the roughness of the focuser still means that the images I captured weren't very sharp.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Some of the grain you see is the combination of setting the "speed" to ISO 1600, and getting a little too aggressive with the sharpening filter in my computer. I have not been completely happy with the focuser that came on Big Bertha because of an inability to get a sharp focus. If I had sufficient inward travel to do prime focus astrophotography, I would buy one of the helical fine focus inserts for it instead. But perhaps getting a lower profile focuser (which would almost certainly a smoother and finer focus as well) would be worth considering. Labels: astrophotography, telescopes More About The Efforts to Shut Down The Salvation Army's Homeless Family Shelter There's a meeting of the Boise Planning & Zoning Commission Monday, January 22, 2007 starting at 6:00 PM, to hear appeals from both sides of this dispute. The Salvation Army seems to be claiming that their existing Conditional Use Permit (CUP) issued in 1969 for a home for unwed mothers is not fundamentally different from the current use as a family homeless shelter. The Booth Neighbors are also appealing the Planning Director's decision--which was that the Salvation Army needs to get approval for a modification to the existing CUP to continue operating the family homeless shelter. I went over there today to take a look at the neighborhood. Unlike some North End neighborhoods (some only a few blocks away), the immediate vicinity of the Salvation Army facility is extraordinarily uniform in how nice everything is. Some surrounding neighborhoods are obviously still in the process of gentrification; the several blocks surrounding the Salvation Army are already full there. The Salvation Army facility occupies an entire block. I am hard pressed to see how complaints about noise or parking could be applicable to this situation, unless the situation there is far more out of control than I can imagine the Army allowing.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge We drove through the surrounding neighborhoods, looking for evidence of the boyfriends sleeping in their cars. Admittedly, it wa | ||||||||||||||||||||
