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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, March 31, 2007
Divorce Rates I've long been under the impression, from watching the disasters going on around me, that a lot of divorces are driven, at their core, by economic pressures. The divorces that I have seen have often been of the following model: 1. Mom and Dad both work full-time. 2. Mom and Dad both come up exhausted. 3. Dad comes home, puts up his feet; Mom starts work on "the second shift": laundry, cleaning, dinner, helping kids with homework. 4. At the end of an exhausting day, Dad still wants a romantic interlude; Mom is too tired. Even in homes where Dad is doing his share of the responsibilities under #3, men and women are somewhat different. Men are usually not too tired for a romp between the sheets; women often are. 5. Eventually, the result of #4 is that, under the best of conditions, Dad meets some gal at work who isn't too tired, or Mom meets some guy who is willing to listen to her complaints about her life--at least long enough for the romp between the sheets that Dad isn't getting. Eventually, the marriage breaks up. I was reading a paper that my wife was grading that made the rather interesting claim that there's no correlation between divorce and income levels. This was rather startling to me--and apparently not true. I found quite a number of papers, from quite a range of years, that show that the lower your income level, the more likely that you are to get divorced: Characterizing the situation as one of “not as much marriage” among disadvantaged people misses an important distinction. Tying the knot does not seem to be an issue: rather, the problem appears to be maintaining the union thereafter. Statistics from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), as reported by Bramlett and Mosher (2002), demonstrate this distinction for a variety of individual and community-level indicators of disadvantage. This paper, like many others, shows that no-fault divorce laws increase divorce rates. (This has to be among the major "Duh!" discoveries of all time. That was the reason for no-fault divorce laws--to make it easier to get divorced!) As the abstract explains: Also, education and income data from the United States Bureau of the Census and religiosity data from the Glenmary Research Center were used to assess the relation of education, median family income, and religiosity to the post-no-fault divorce rate. Results revealed that no-fault divorce law had a significant positive effect on the divorce rate across the 50 states. Of the moderators that we considered, median family income was the only significant predictor of the change in divorce rate; the adjusted post-no-fault divorce rate increased as median family income increased.Interesting. My guess is that a lot of people who were reasonably comfortable to downright wealthy tolerated a marriage that wasn't completely happy because the alternative was seeing much of the shared wealth end up with the lawyers in a contested divorce. No-fault divorce reduced the financial pain, and thus made it a bit easier for people with money to say, "Okay, I've had enough. I'm outta here!" This report claims: The data in Table 1 show virtually no relationship between the number of hours the wife worked outside the home and the reported marital happiness of either the wife or the husband. There is no definitive evidence that the wife's working outside the home does affect marital quality, but these cross-sectional data do not prove that it does not.I'm not quite sure what this saying. It almost sounds like a double negative to avoid admitting that there is some correlation, but it is a very small one. Perhaps there is some confounding relationship involved; maybe a lot of women who are staying at home to raise children are doing so because they have so little in the way of job skills that it doesn't make sense for them to work outside the home, and because these families have very high divorce rates because of low incomes, it is disguising such a connection. I wish that I more time to read these studies and consider them in more detail; my wife and I are headed out for our 27th anniversary dinner onboard the Thunder Mountain Line, a train that will serve us dinner while we wind up through the forests north of here. Labels: family values Iran Wants a War--Why We Shouldn't Accommodate Them The latest news is that Iran is talking about putting the British sailors and marines on trial: TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's ambassador to Russia renewed a threat Iranian officials made earlier this week, saying 15 British sailors held by Iran could be tried for violating international law, Iran's state news agency IRNA reported Saturday.It should be obvious that both the seizure of British military personnel in Iraqi waters, and this threat to try them, is an attempt to force the West to go to war against Iran. Why? Because the Iranian government is in big trouble internally, and their best hope to unify the Iranian people is an external threat, and to be sure that their allies in the West, such as the billionaire wing of the Democratic Party, can turn this in a basis for taking control of the White House in 2008. This is a hard situation. We can't just let the Iranian government go ahead with a show trial. On the other hand, giving them what they want--a war--isn't a good idea either. I would imagine that British and American intelligence agencies are busily trying to figure out where these sailors and marines are being kept, so that a rescue mission can pluck them out. I think it is likely that Iran has separated them into a number of different facilities, to make it impossible to do this. I really don't know what the solution to this is. The American people, having chosen to put a party in control of Congress that is beholden to billionaire traitors like George Soros, have created a nearly impossible situation. The best that we can hope is that Iran doesn't execute these sailors and marines before the Iranian government's internal economic problems get bad enough to force a revolution. Labels: terrorism Poor, Poor Pitiful Me I hope you recognize the lines from the Linda Ronstadt song! I was wondering why American Rifleman (one of NRA's magazines) hadn't mentioned my new book Armed America--and then my wife mentioned that she had seen it in the March issue. Sure enough! So there's no excuse for every NRA member who gets American Rifleman not to go out and buy a copy! Labels: my books When In Doubt: Lie! I've mentioned before fake hate crimes here--cases where someone claimed to have been a victim because their sexual orientation (and much more rarely, because of race) where it turned out that not only was the crime not based on bias--but the only crime was when the "victim" lied to the police about it. Here's another case where it isn't clear who told the lie, but the medical examiner and police concluded that he died of natural causes: DETROIT (AP) — Police said Wednesday that an elderly gay man whose death became a national focus for gay rights advocates based on reports he had been fatally attacked because of his sexual orientation actually died of natural causes. Labels: fake hate crimes, homosexuality Another Environmentalist Lectures Us About Global Warming John Travolta: His serious aviation habit means he is hardly the best person to lecture others on the environment. But John Travolta went ahead and did it anyway.And make sure you visit the article for the picture of his five jets parked at his house. Maybe he should have also lectured us about living simply, so that others may simply live. Labels: global warming, hypocrisy Friday, March 30, 2007
Experiments With Weird Washers This need for a .010" thick, 2" diameter washer has been quite frustrating. The duct work sheet metal was the right thickness, and I was able to turn it down to the right diameter on the lathe--but it wasn't pretty when I was done. It does the job well, since it is just flexible enough to deform between the teeth and the slots. So I tried turning the edge of a 2" diameter, 3/8" hole fender washer to .010". This was very slow and difficult, since this is made of steel, and even going from .07" to .01" is not fun. But here's the bad part--a .010" piece of steel is still very stiff, and doesn't really do the job. I've ordered some .010" sample washers from a company in Idaho Falls that makes them--but these are 2.5" diameter, so I will have to turn them down, or order a custom shipment. I am beginning to suspect that they are going to be too stiff. I picked up a 2' x 4' sheet of .010" polypropylene (I think) at Interstate Plastics today, which they use for business cards. It is very nearly the perfect combination of flexible but hard to tear. I was able to cut one 2" circle with scissors, and it did the job very well--and it might even be durable enough that I won't need to use metal for this. But the problem is that it is very hard to do this, except with scissors. I tried folding it over and using the "paper dolls" approach with a hole saw in the drill press, but the results were ragged and ugly. I guess the next step is one of those very sharp dies to cut these out of the sheet, one at a time, perhaps with a hammer. I really need to find someone who can stamp these out of .010" aluminum, I think. Labels: machining A Truly Weird Gun Self-Defense Case And an example of how leaving out just one or two details can really change what you read. A guy comes home, finds his wife with a guy in a truck in the driveway, and she's wearing only underwear and a bathrobe. From the March 30, 2007 Fort Worth Star-Telegram is this report. She screams she's being raped--the driver starts to pull away, with the wife still in the car: FORT WORTH -- In December, Darrell Roberson fatally shot a man outside his Arlington home after finding the man and his wife in a compromising position inside a pickup.Remember, she claims that she's being raped, and she's still in the vehicle as it pulls away. Roberson does something that is not only legally in the right, but only a hopeless pacifist would not take action. This isn't some stranger who says she's being raped--it is his wife. There's no question of hoping the police catch the rapist later--he is taking Roberson's wife away, potentially to be killed as a witness. This AP account published in Delaware leaves out one rather important detail--that the pickup truck is driving away with Roberson's wife still in it. That turns from a lawful but perhaps questionable "fleeing felon" shooting into a "to prevent death or great bodily injury to another" shooting. "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." -- Romans 6:23. Even if it's just a little sin, like adultery, and another little sin, like lying about it. Labels: gun defense aftermath The Effects of the Minnesota Shall-Issue Carry Permit Law The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune, which has never been our friend on gun-related matters, and certainly not on concealed carry, has a lengthy article today about the effects of the new law. It is not very complete in one respect (you'll learn more later), but considering the clear preference that the paper has, this is a surprisingly fair analysis. The first page, and second page: Gun-carry law hasn't produced more crimeThe article does report what has been the experience of other states--as initial opponents in law enforcement have seen that the sky didn't fall: "There was an awful lot of hype on both sides before the law passed," said state Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion. "It just hasn't materialized. I never believed there'd be a decrease in crime because people carry guns."The article does have some data on the number of permits issued: No Minnesota permit holder has ever been convicted of robbery. And a Star Tribune comparison of overall crime statistics and state reports of convictions of permit holders indicates that their likelihood of committing an assault is about 17 times less than the general population's, 12 times less for drunken driving and 31 times less for drug crimes.The article also makes this claim which turns out to be incomplete, based on news accounts that my co-blogger Pete Drum found when looking through our newly indexed Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog: Meanwhile, the single "lawful and justifiable" use of a firearm reported among Minnesota's 42,189 permit holders over the past four years did not involve self-defense or efforts to stop a crime, but rather a Wabasha County man who drew complaints about target shooting near someone's property but faced no charges.We make no pretenses of catching every incident that gets reported in the media, but we have two examples (here and here) of clear-cut defensive uses by Minnesota carry permitholders that were reported--and the Star-Tribune couldn't find these? Labels: gun rights, gun self-defense Fraudulent History At least this time, it isn't being done by a tenured history professor. This web site has what would seem to be an irrefutable example of fraud--the cropping of a photograph of black Union soldiers in Philadelphia so that the unmistakable Union Army uniform of an officer isn't present--and then sold by this operation as a photograph of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. Now, the Louisiana Native Guards were real; a free black militia unit that defended the city of New Orleans from Union attack--but promptly switched sides when the Union won that battle--but this photograph is an attempt by whoever cropped the Union officer out and mislabeled the picture to present the Confederacy as being driven not primarily by slavery or race. UPDATE: The proprietor of the website selling that picture, when I brought to his attention the clear evidence that it was fraud, without argument immediately withdrew it from sale. Labels: history Thursday, March 29, 2007
Promises, Promises When I first arranged phone service here last year, Frontier Telephone offered me DSL. And the decision about this took almost a millisecond. But when it came time for the technician to show up--he didn't. Apparently they suddenly realized that they didn't have the remote terminal close enough to my house to provide it. (For practical purposes, you need to be within 17,000 feet of the remote terminal--and ideally closer than 12,000 feet--to get DSL.) So I ended up with service from BitSmart, using a radio arrangement. I'm utterly thrilled with the BitSmart crowd--a little operation doing a great job, considering their scale. But the data rate is limited to 800 kilobits/second--and there some things that you really notice with a wireless service, not increased packet loss, which makes working from home pretty frustrating at times. So, Frontier Telephone called me up last month and offered me unlimited calling in the U.S. for $49.95. Okay, sign me up! Sure, I would receive everything in the mail in 3-5 days. Never showed up. This evening they called up again, and made the same offer--but this time, they offered to include DSL as well for a total of $89.95 per month (plus $4.99 per month for rental of the DSL router). By now, I've gotten rather cynical, but I said, "Sure! Sign me up!" We'll see if they come through. They are promising "up to" 3 megabits/second. If they can give me even comparable speed to BitSmart, I'll take it, just for the advantage of not dropping packets like crazy. If they can give me 1.5 megabits, I'll be very happy. At 3 megabits, the joy will be overwhelming. Dobson & Thompson My first reaction when I saw Instapundit link to this article was, "Hasn't Dobson ever heard of a 'stealth candidate'?" Focus on the Family founder James Dobson appeared to throw cold water on a possible presidential bid by former Sen. Fred Thompson while praising former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also weighing a presidential run, in a phone interview Tuesday.Yes, I would prefer to have the next president be someone that shares my religious beliefs--I would rather have someone who voted the right way, even if he wasn't terribly loud about his beliefs, instead of someone who makes quite a loud noise of his or her Christianity--and consistently supports an anti-Christian agenda. (There are several Democrats in that category at the moment.) Now I see this press release from Focus on the Family saying that Dobson was misquoted: "In his conversation with Mr. Gilgoff, Dr. Dobson was attempting to highlight that to the best of his knowledge, Sen. Thompson hadn't clearly communicated his religious faith, and many evangelical Christians might find this a barrier to supporting him. Dr. Dobson told Mr. Gilgoff he had never met Sen. Thompson and wasn't certain that his understanding of the former senator's religious convictions was accurate. Unfortunately, these qualifiers weren't reported by Mr. Gilgoff. We were, however, pleased to learn from his spokesperson that Sen. Thompson professes to be a believer.["]Well let's see: is Dobson backpedaling? Or was he quoted out of context by a reporter? From my own experiences over the years (including a reporter making up a quote that said exactly the opposite of what I said in a public meeting), I guess I'll lean to the latter explanation. I agree with Dobson far more than I disagree with him, and I respect him quite a bit. That same press release also indicates that Dobson has pressed Newt Gingrich (who is apparently Dobson's preference) to explain his really loathsome treatment of his first wife. (Serving divorce papers on your wife while she's hospitalized for cancer--oh, that's classy!) I think very highly of Newt Gingrich--smart as a whip. But he's a lightning rod with respect to the left's hatred of him in a way that Sen. Thompson is not. At least for the moment, I'm backing Thompson. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Bizarre Reasoning Josh Horwitz is the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In a column here, he argues that the recent Parker decision is a vindication of the Confederacy: The only modern Supreme Court case to look at the issue, United States v. Miller, found that the Second Amendment was designed to preserve the effectiveness of the organized militia.Horwitz's claim is peculiar, to the say the least. Gun control advocates have long maintained that the Second Amendment doesn't protect an individual right, but the right of the states to maintain their own military forces. Gun rights activists say that it does nothing of the sort; it protects an individual right to be armed. In this case, the Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of the individual right--specifically rejecting the gun control advocate claim about its meaning. And so Horwitz claims that Parker is a defense of the position of the Confederacy--which organized state military forces to fight the government? If anything, the gun control argument is the Confederacy's argument--the Second Amendment protects the right of the states to organize military forces to fight the federal government. The Parker decision specifically rejects this narrow view of the Second Amendment. Labels: gun history, gun rights 2" Diameter Thin Steel or Aluminum Discs? A few ScopeRoller customers have complained about too much play in the deluxe caster assemblies when locked down. It seems that some mounts, when you reposition the telescope, transfer enough motion to the casters that it affects polar alignment. How much motion? If I lock the caster, it presses down several "teeth" made of steel that lock into corresponding gaps in the caster assembly. However: the "teeth" are slightly narrower than the gaps into which they lock, and so there is several hundredths of an inch of potential motion. With three casters, this motion can add up into the tenths of an inch that the mount can move from true north. If you aren't as astrophotographer, you are probably making unkind comparisons between these finicky customers and Hans Christian Andersen's The Princess and the Pea. If you are making exposures that last 30 minutes to more than hour, however, even a small motion of the polar axis from true north starts to matter! Okay, I've been looking for a solution that doesn't require the caster manufacturer to make a special high precision run, just for me--which would drive the parts cost up to the stratosphere. But I think that I have a solution that is cheap, and best of all, can be retrofitted by customers in the field. What I need is a source for very thin, 2" diameter steel or aluminum discs. They need to be thin enough to slide between "teeth" and gaps, and when I lock the caster for the first time, the teeth will crush the edges of the disc into the gaps--filling them completely. At the same time, they can't be so thin that they tear under the pressure. If they are just a little too large a diameter, I can stack a bunch of them together on the lathe and gang-trim them to 2.0". Any possible sources? I wonder if this is the size of some common microdisk drive, and perhaps there's someone who has large numbers of 2" diameter aluminum disks that were rejected for failing a flatness test before coating them with magnetic material. UPDATE: Here's a source for brass, aluminum, stainless steel, and copper disks, 2" in diameter, in sizes for .016" to .051". The minimum order is a bit annoying when I only want three or four items initially, but that's life. UPDATE 2: Unfortunately, even .016" is too thick for what I need. But what I do need are thin washers--and they are out there. Labels: machining Ramapo College Event Upcoming Here's the flyer for it. The reservations are so the organizers know how large a crowd to expect, how much in the way of refreshments to provide. Feel free to redistribute anywhere and everywhere. Labels: my books Incredible Windstorm Last Night I was expecting to wake up this morning and discover that all my neighbors were very, very short, singing, "Following the Yellow Brick Road." UPDATE: After the storm. (If you click the picture, you will get a full 10 megapixel image--this might take a while to load.)  Click to enlarge Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Liberal Myths About Freedom of Speech One of the more depressing aspects of reading Volokh Conspiracy is that a lot of lawyers and law students hang out there, and the comments that they leave leave me quite worried about the future of law in America. I'm not just concerned because they are so overwhelmingly liberal, but they seem to have an astonishing ignorance of not just the history of our laws, but the current state of our laws. Professor Orin Kerr had a fairly nuts and bolts discussion: Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear a constitutional challenge to a provision of the 2003 PROTECT Act that prohibits presenting or promoting material designed to create the belief that the material is child pornography. The PROTECT Act added this provision in response to the Supreme Court's 2002 decision in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition; that decision had invalidated a broader version of the crime on First Amendment grounds.Some of the comments show a profound ignorance of the First Amendment's original intent, how the Supreme Court has interpreted it--and even what the current state of our laws is. A number of these nitwits insisted that the First Amendment protects any form of expression--anything that you can say, or draw, or make a virtual image of, is protected, including child porn created on a computer so that no actual child was involved. Guess what? Not only does the First Amendment not protect anything and everything that you can say--and the Supreme Court has, in cases like Chaplinsky affirmed that--but there are lots of laws on the books that punish simple words alone: 1. Treason, for example, can include giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States in time of war. 2. Libel--including criminal libel still in a number of states. (As an example, back in the 1970s, an underground Los Angeles paper put a picture of actress Angie Dickinson's head on a picture of a naked, plausibly Angie Dickinson body--and they were charged with criminal libel.) 3. Slander. 4. Fraud. Hey, it's just words! 5. Threatening someone's life--even if you never take any action to cause injury. I keep hoping that whoever is putting stupid pills into the public reservoirs will stop, but if anything, the problem is getting worse. Labels: freedom of speech When the Majesty of the Law Isn't Enough From March 27, 2007 UPI: JACKSONVILLE, Fla., March 27 (UPI) -- A Jacksonville, Fla., judge drew his handgun when an accused child molester was attacked by an alleged victim's father in court.Would you feel better being in the line of fire of the baliff or (worse) friends of the defendant? Labels: gun rights How Can You Tell An Environmentalist Has Been in Your City? All the jet fuel is used up, and your house electric is 20x larger than usual! No, seriously, a good friend who is a serious enviromentalist and AGW True Believer sends me with disgust this latest example of Environmental Hypocrisy from the family that during the 2004 election campaign lied about what SUVs they owned (scroll down to "John Kerry's car trouble"), and has a boat that burns 500 gallons of fossil fuel in a weekend: Yesterday morning when our new book This Moment On Earth went on sale in bookstores nationwide, it was ranked 3,398th on Amazon.Com. Labels: global warming, hypocrisy How You Can Tell That A Liberal is the President of Your University He threatens retaliation against College Republicans because he didn't like a flyer--and apparently fires employees for failing to engage in censorship: The Boise State College Republicans may not be the only ones taking the heat for the controversial fliers promoting “America’s Illegal Alien Invasion”. According to a BSU College Republicans Press Release, Assistant Director of Student Activities, Michael Esposito, may have been terminated.Look, the flyer was offensive in a playful way. I would not have put together such a flyer. (Even when I was the age of the College Republicans, I think I would laughed loudly and said, "We can't do this.") Still, someone does need to remind Kustra that this pesky thing called the First Amendment doesn't just apply to student groups with pictures of Che Guevara, and student presentations of plays like The Vagina Monologues. It even applies to Republicans! Labels: freedom of speech, political correctness The Brady Campaign is Getting Desperate Their latest press release seeks to discourage state legislatures from passing laws that allow concealed carry holders from having guns in their cars in publicly accessible parking lots: WASHINGTON, March 27 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- With multiple states considering bills that would force businesses to allow employees to bring guns to work, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has sent key state legislators across the country important data to consider.The problem is that when you read that report (which oddly enough, is actually in the British Medical Journal--the link to the full article takes you here) you see that they are not discussing workplace situations with much relevance to the laws in question. The article describes the type of workplaces that they are comparing. The workplaces that allow armed employees include "convenience stores, petrol stations, grocery shops, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and taxi services." In short, businesses with customers coming into the store to shop and rob or to get drunk and behave badly. Employers with prohibitions on guns on the premises tend to be ones like mine, where there are no customers walking in the door anonymously, and that aren't open at night. I'm sure if gas stations, nightclubs, bars, and taxi cab companies had the same operating hours, requirements to show ID for non-employees, secured entrances, they would have comparable murder rates. A detailed breakdown of the murder circumstances the study examined show what is going on: "Of the 105 murders studied, 60 were associated with a robbery of the workplace and 39 with disputes. Of the disputes, 20 were work related, 16 were with a partner or family member, and three were other or unknown." The workplace robberies have nothing to do with employees having guns in the parking lot. Of the 16 "with a partner or family member," unless you work with that partner or family member, it seems hard to believe that these were because an employee had a gun in the car in the parking lot. A bit more detail about the twenty "work related" would be useful. I would not be surprised if there were murders were someone got upset, went out to the parking lot, got his gun, and went back inside. But I would be very surprised if most of these twenty murders were like that. Labels: gun rights Where's My Global Warming? It is snowing at my house today. And yes, I'm being humorous about this. On a more serious note, I think it is important to recognize the role that economic self-interest may be playing in driving some of the self-righteous overcertainty of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) advocates--the sort of person who argues that scientists who are raising solar activity theories are "AGW deniers" (by analogy to Holocaust deniers) or equivalent to Young Earth Creationists. There are a surprising number of people who are invested in businesses that have a vested interest in AGW being correct. One example is Al Gore's ownership of a firm that sells carbon indulgences. Another person with whom I have been conversing by private email (and whose tone when it comes to AGW reminds me much of Young Earth Creationists with whom I have had similar discussions) is involved with a biodiesel company, hoping to become mildly wealthy from it. Sometimes, it is easy to lose your objectivity when money gets involved. Over the years, I've seen a lot of people who confused "doing God's work" and making a living. When you start to roll something about which you passionately care with something that is also your livelihood, it is very easy to start to confuse the two in your mind. Pretty soon, you are doing your "ministry" because you need the income to pay your rent and grocery bills--and the temptation to focus more on fundraising than the mission with which you started can become overpowering. There are people who are genuine flim-flam artists--who know that when they preach the importance of a cause, while selling something related to that cause, that is all about money. This is unavoidable. But there are a lot of people who mislead themselves, not just others. They convince themselves that their cause is correct, and fail to see how their financial interest in that cause makes it difficult for them to see flaws or deficiencies in their cause. Obviously, if you make practically nothing from your business investment in the cause, it isn't going to be much of an influence. At one time, I was a small scale gun dealer--the "kitchen table gun dealers" that the Brady campaign liked to pretend were arming criminals. The whole nine years that I sold guns, I never had a trace request. To my knowledge, not a single one of the hundreds of guns that I sold was ever criminally misused or came to the attention of law enforcement--or I expect that I would have heard about it. Now, if I had been making my living as a gun dealer, or even made a healthy side income, it might have been a legitimate question as to whether my livelihood made me more strident in my gun rights activism. In the very best years, I may have made a couple of hundred dollars profit, and saved myself a couple of hundred dollars on guns, ammo, and related supplies. Even back then, my interest income far exceeded my gun dealer income every year. The left is partial to assuming that each and every scientist who has raised objections to the current AGW hysteria has been "bought off" by Big Carbon. At times I wonder if there might be a bit of projection involved in this. (And why won't Big Carbon send some money my way?) Labels: global warming Interview With the Washington Times About My New Book It's here. Something happened to the punctuation in a number of places. I hope that's not a quirk of the print edition as well! Labels: gun rights, my books Monday, March 26, 2007
Improving My Focus I was hunting around looking for some way to improve the focus on my Pentax on Saturn, and I found this method of getting a sharp focus which is fiendishly clever--and I did not know about. You make what is called a Hartman Mask, which contains two holes the same size on opposite sides, and which goes over the front on your telescope. Aim it at a reasonably bright star, and out of focus, you will have two images of the star; in focus, and you have one. I'll make one and report back when next we get clear skies. Right now, we have a wind storm going on that is truly disturbing. Labels: astrophotography Solar Activity Here's some more evidence that the science of solar influence isn't all that perfectly understood--and the Sun is acting weird! Even a paper by authors who claim that solar output changes are no more than 30% of the recent increase in temperature, admit that the Sun is acting unusual recently: Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years Even this paper, which claims that human activity is is a major factor in global warming, admits that we are in an unusually active solar activity period--and only 10% of the last 11,400 years has been this active. Labels: global warming The Ford Pinto Exploding Gas Tank It is conventional wisdom that the evil management sorts at Ford greedily decided to cheap out on the Ford Pinto's gas tank design because it was cheaper to pay for people killed and horribly burned than it was to make the car a dollar or so more expensive to build. So I was quite surprised to read this law review article by a UCLA law professor that indicates that the Pinto really wasn't particularly dangerous compared to other subcompact cars on the road at the time. Ford's attorneys presented evidence, and apparently the plaintiff's attorneys did not dispute that the Pinto was middle of the pack on this. See p. 1029, where the article shows fatality rates by various car models in deaths per million cars in operation in 1975 and 1976. Interesting. Thanks to We Should Live for the pointer. Labels: consumer fraud Universal Health Care One of the recurring concerns about having the government in charge of health care (so we can be more like Canada and Britain) is what happens when the government has to decide which health concerns are highest priority? This video shows what happened when two people in Ontario needed medical care. One of them was put on a waiting list for a procedure--and because the waiting list was so long, she had to have her bladder removed, and now has a charming little bag attached instead. The other person has the good fortune to have a medical "problem" that Ontario's Health Minister thinks is really important: he was born the wrong sex. Under the best of circumstances, government control of the health care system means that the majority decides what's most important, and people with relatively rare or unusual health problems may find themselves shunted to the back of the line. But under real circumstances--where powerful and loud minority groups get what they want--well, wants take precedence over medical needs. Labels: health care Please Tell Me This Is an ACLU False Front Organization... The alternative is that there are people still trying to argue that the Bible teaches the Earth is the center of the universe: What strikes you as being some thoughts that people would have if--in the short space of a few weeks--the universally held conviction that the Earth rotates on an "axis" daily and orbits the sun annually was exposed as an unscientific deception?By the way, whoever the dimbulb responsible for this page better learn that Marx's collaborator was Frederick Engels, not "Friedrich Ingles." Labels: ignorance Penn & Teller's Anti-Gun Control Program I'm not sure where Penn & Teller came from, but they seem to have a following somewhere or another, and a cable television show with a title that is too vulgar for me to quote. This particular program is laced with vulgar language, but I suppose if you are trying to appeal to a vulgar audience--and one that is naturally prone to gun control, because they think Jon Stewart's Daily Show qualifies as a news program, then this is probably quite effective. People that are familiar with the arguments for and against gun control won't learn anything here, but in a vulgar sort of way, they do a good job of covering the basics, interview some people that you've heard of (Dr. John Lott, for example), and some people that you may not have heard of, such as Texas Rep. Suzanne Gratia-Hupp--who I had the good fortune to share a short plane flight with some years ago. Labels: gun rights Why The Federal Courts Will Eventually Find a Right to Polygamy This New York Times article really captures the ambivalence of liberalism about polygamy. Sure, it's bad for women, but why be narrow-minded, especially since it is identified with the religion that is at war with America? And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.Germany is well on the way. In the conflict between the Western value of respect for women, and the Koran's teachings about the status of women, guess which wins in a German court? BERLIN -- Politicians and Muslim leaders denounced a German judge for citing the Quran in her rejection of a Muslim woman's request for a quick divorce on grounds she was abused by her husband.There are times when a civilization commits suicide, not because it believes that all cultures are equally valuable (which might justify "you do your thing in your country, I'll do my thing in my country"), but because it believes that almost any other culture is superior to its own. And that seems to be increasingly the case in Europe. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization, polygamy "Lesbian Asks Court to Ban Gay Adoptions" If that sounds like a satirical headline from the Onion, well, I can see why you might think that. No, it's the headline from a real news story: Lesbian Asks Court to Ban Gay Adoptions Labels: homosexuality Sunday, March 25, 2007
Giuliani's Past Support for Restrictive Gun Control This video shows when Rudi Giuliani announced the city was suing the gun makers for making more guns than there was a legal market for. Among the amazing claims that he made that gun makers were actually working against their own business interests by flooding the market with cheap guns. Think about this for a second: if he really believed this, then why were gun makers doing this? To enlarge the criminal market? I wasn't keen on Giuliani before, but this conspiracy theory explanation of how gun makers work shows either a bizarre paranoid theory of business or a worrisome dishonesty in trying to justify the otherwise absurd "negligent marketing" theory. Thanks to John Lott for the pointer. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, gun rights |
