The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Saturday, April 14, 2007
Coming Book Tour to New York City
I'll be in New York City Thursday through Sunday. I'll be taping a show with Joey Reynolds on Thursday evening. This list here shows all the stations that carry his show, in what city, and at what time. A reminder also that I will be speaking at Ramapo College in New Jersey on Friday afternoon. See the flyer here.
The weather forecast for Saturday's global warming rallies in Grand Rapids and Holland calls for snow and cold rain and temperatures in the 40s -- about 10 degrees below normal.
For some, this might make global warming a tough sell.
As I have pointed out before, one particular instance of cold weather doesn't disprove global warming--anymore than one particular instance of hot weather proves it--but when you keep getting unseasonably cold weather every time Al Gore speaks about the problem, or that global warming marchers do their thing, or a couple has to abandon their global warming awareness trek across the Arctic because it is too cold, it should make you at least ask, "How certain is this?" Until polar bears start killing and eating environmentalists in Los Angeles, or glaciers force relocation of the United Nations, there will be no questions asked, because this has become a religion.
Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.
You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.
You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.
Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.
The bigots win again.
While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.
I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.
It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.
Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.
...
In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?
I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?
When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.
No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.
A number of states require you to back away from a confrontation outside your home, rather than use deadly force. In the last couple of years, NRA has backed efforts to change the law so you are not required to do so. While I generally support such laws, I also recognize that there might be situations where using deadly force because of such a law would be a tragedy.
For example, a minor dispute over a parking space might escalate rapidly to the use of deadly force--and someone who was a little hotheaded, but otherwise a decent person, is now lying dead on the pavement. The person who shot him will now confront months to years of civil suits and guilt about killing someone when he could have just walked away. Let's call this "non-criminal hothead gets shot" scenario.
WEST PALM BEACH — Norman Borden hopes to become a trailblazer - the first defendant in Florida to have a murder charge dismissed because of the state's fledgling "Castle Doctrine" law.
He should find out next month if he's successful.
The law, in effect since Oct. 1, 2005, expanded an individual's right to self-defense. It allows people to shoot another person in their homes, in their vehicles and in a public place, overriding court rulings that people had a duty to retreat from violent confrontations.
The law states that a person has "the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force" if they believe it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily injury to themselves or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony such as murder or aggravated battery.
Borden, 44, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and three other felonies in connection with the shooting deaths of Christopher Araujo, 19, and Saul Trejo, 21, and the wounding of a third man, Juan Mendez, who was 20 at the time.
At a court hearing on Wednesday, Public Defender Carey Haughwout argued that Circuit Judge William Berger should dismiss the indictment against Borden at a future pretrial hearing, saying that a preponderance of the evidence establishes his right to use deadly force.
"He is immune from liability," she said.
Prosecutor Craig Williams agreed that Berger could make a pretrial determination on whether the Castle Doctrine applies, but argued that the judge need only consider whether there was probable cause - sufficient facts and circumstances to believe that a crime was committed by Borden - in deciding he should go to trial. Even if Borden proceeds to trial, a jury could decide he feared for his life and acquit him.
Several people attended the hearing wearing T-shirts that read, "RIP Chris and Smiley." "Smiley" was a nickname of Trejo.
...
Sheriff's investigators say that one of the men Borden killed was a local leader in a criminal nationwide street gang known as Surenos 13 or Sur-13. Borden's attorneys identified him as Trejo. Investigators also say it was Sur-13 members who set fire to Borden's home a couple of days after the shootings.
Borden and a friend were walking his dogs in his Westgate neighborhood in suburban West Palm Beach around 3 a.m. in October when he exchanged words with either Mendez or Araujo, according to witnesses. Araujo got behind the wheel of a Jeep, accompanied by Trejo, Mendez and a juvenile and drove toward Borden, with more yelling back and forth.
After the juvenile got out of the Jeep, the men drove at Borden and his friend again. Trejo had a bat, according to Borden's attorneys, and he or Araujo also may have had a gun. This time, Borden opened fire on the Jeep until he had fired 14 rounds from his 9mm handgun. Then he went home and called police.
In arguing for dismissal of Borden's indictment, Haughwout maintained that the Jeep was driven in a way that made it a deadly weapon, along with the bat and possible gun. Her client had a right to be on a public street and was doing nothing at the time of the incident. And so, she said, he had a right to use deadly force.
A couple of points:
1. It took a year from passage of the law to an incident where this became an issue. I guess there aren't as many Floridians wandering the streets with Death Wish fantasies as opponents thought.
2. Gang member. Baseball bat. Driving a vehicle yelling at Borden. Gang members retaliate by setting fire to Borden's home. Hmmm. Maybe it wasn't wise for Borden to open fire (because of retaliation) but at least from this newspaper account, it sounds more like the "gang members intimidate decent people" scenario.
A political science professor recently used this phrase to describe what police in Atlanta were doing. What could he be referring to? I'll give you a hint: he teaches "Gay and Lesbian History, Politics and Culture" at Hunter College in New York. So...do you think the police are looking in the windows of gay people's homes? Perhaps they are dressing up like the Village People, and cruising gay bars, waiting for someone to make a lewd suggestion to them?
ATLANTA (AP) - At the world's busiest airport, plainclothes officers patrolling public restrooms in search of luggage thieves have instead uncovered a rash of other, more sordid crimes.
The new restroom dragnet has led to the arrests of more than 30 people in three months for indecent exposure and public sex acts at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Airport restrooms apparently have become such popular meeting places for men looking for sexual trysts with other men that they have been suggested several times as meeting places in personal ads on the Web site Craigslist.
"Hey ... I'm stuck at the airport from 5 p.m. and I'm looking for a good time ...," one ad reads. In another, the person posting says he is stuck at the airport for three hours in the evening and is looking for "discreet, quick action."
The new patrols were started to stop theft, not catch people in sex acts, police officials say.
Officers started monitoring the restrooms after figuring out that thieves were pulling bags off baggage-claim carousels and taking them into toilet stalls to comb through them.
"We're trying to provide a safe environment for everyone at the airport," said Officer Joseph Villafane, a police spokesman. "We're not out to get all that—it's just we encounter it."
Among those arrested is Ed Wall, the board chairman of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. An officer said he saw Wall having oral sex with another man. Wall, who has temporarily stepped down from his post, has maintained his innocence. A court date has not been set.
The other court cases are pending.
Now, the article did interview a clinical psychologist who explained that this type of action is a form of exhibitionism:
James Cates, a clinical psychologist, said airport indecency arrests usually involve people getting caught performing sexual acts. He said it illustrates compulsive behavior known as exhibitionism.
"They're not a lot different from any compulsion ... it's just that this kind of behavior can be offensive to people and can be traumatizing," said Cates, who counsels and performs psychological testing on sex offenders and people with sexual disorders. "They've got to have the thrill and as they keep not getting caught or reported, the thrill gets less and less. It has to become more risky and daring to keep the thrill up."
This doesn't seem like a very conservative thing to say, does it? Ah, but count on someone who teaches "Gay and Lesbian History, Politics and Culture" to see something perverse not in having sex with strangers in a public restroom, but arresting people for doing so:
"Police have far better things to do with their time than to arrest people for this," said Kenneth Sherrill, professor at Hunter College of The City University of New York. "Being 'sex police' in bathrooms strikes me as a perversion of rational law enforcement activities."
I hear a lot from homosexuals that the public restroom sex and the other perversions that are so common in the gay community are a tiny minority of the gay community--no different from the sadomasochists and exhibitionists who participate in Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This might well be true. So why is Professor Sherrill--who, one presumes, is concerned about projecting a true and accurate picture of homosexuality--calling these arrests a "perversion of rational law enforcement activities"? Professor Sherrill's quote that he sees arresting exhibitionists as the perversion suggests that he thinks picking up strangers for sex in public restrooms isn't a perversion.
1. Head southwest on Tremont St toward School St 115 ft 2. Turn left at School St 0.1 mi 1 min 3. Turn left at Washington St 115 ft 4. Turn right at Water St 0.2 mi 1 min 5. Turn right at Kilby St/Liberty Square 240 ft 6. Turn left at Milk St 0.2 mi 2 mins 7. Continue on Central St 0.1 mi 8. Turn right at Long Wharf 0.1 mi 9. Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi 29 days 0 hours
Oddly enough, when I ask it to give me directions from Santa Monica, CA to Honolulu, HI, it claims that it can't do it. It appears to consider the Atlantic Ocean traversable, but not the Pacific Ocean.
I've never heard this guy before, so I had no idea he was on the liberal end of the spectrum, and Democrats have long relied upon him. This Los Angeles Times article is an eye opener:
WASHINGTON — They came by the hundreds that hot August day in tiny Johnson City, Tenn., gathering on an asphalt parking lot to meet Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. It was not just that he might become the state's first black senator. More than that, even in Republican eastern Tennessee, the Democratic congressman was a celebrity — a regular guest on Don Imus' radio show.
And today, with Imus' career in tatters, the fate of the controversial shock jock is stirring quiet but heartfelt concern in an unlikely quarter: among Democratic politicians.
That's because, over the years, Democrats such as Ford came to count on Imus for the kind of sympathetic treatment that Republicans got from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.
Equally important, Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men.
With Imus' show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.
"This is a real bind for Democrats," said Dan Gerstein, an advisor to one of Imus' favorite regulars, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). "Talk radio has become primarily the province of the right, and the blogosphere is largely the province of the left. If Imus loses his microphone, there aren't many other venues like it around."
Jim Farrell, a former aide to 2000 presidential candidate and Imus regular Bill Bradley, said the firing "creates a vacuum."
This week, when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) was asked by CNN why he picked Imus' show to announce his presidential candidacy, Dodd explained: "He's got a huge audience; he gives you enough time to talk, not a 30-second sound bite, a chance to explain your views; … and a chance to reach the audience who doesn't always watch the Sunday morning talk shows."
The three young men who she accused are truly innocent of the charges brought against them according to the North Carolina Attorney General and the investigation led by his office.
But perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for Reade Seligman, Collin Finnerty and David Evans is just a bit misplaced. They got special treatment in the justice system--both negative and positive. The conduct of the lacrosse team of which they were members was not admirable on the night of the incident, to say the least. And there are so many other victims of prosecutorial misconduct in this country who never get the high-priced legal representation and the high-profile, high-minded vindication that it strikes me as just a bit unseemly to heap praise and sympathy on these particular men.
So as we rightly cover the vindication of these young men and focus on the genuine ordeal they have endured, let us also remember a few other things:
They were part of a team that collected $800 to purchase the time of two strippers.
Their team specifically requested at least one white stripper.
Look, there were a lot of people who, even while skeptical of the rape charges, pointed out that both the strippers and the lacrosse team were showing a remarkable lack of judgment. I pointed to Ann Coulter's column last year about this:
However the Duke lacrosse rape case turns out, one lesson that absolutely will not be learned is this: You can severely reduce your chances of having a false accusation of rape leveled against you if you don't hire strange women to come to your house and take their clothes off for money.
Also, you can severely reduce your chances of being raped if you do not go to strange men's houses and take your clothes off for money. (Does anyone else detect a common thread here?)
And if you are a girl in Aruba or New York City, among the best ways to avoid being the victim of a horrible crime is to not get drunk in public or go off in a car with men you just met. While we're on the subject of things every 5-year-old should know, I also recommend against dousing yourself in gasoline and striking a match.
Everyone makes mistakes, especially young people, but the outpouring of support for the victims and their families is obscuring what ought to be a flashing neon warning for potential future victims.
I pointed out that some of the emails after this party were pretty repulsive. But for a liberal to get all high and mighty about a bunch of college students behaving in a sexually immoral way is absurd. What next, are they going to suddenly be concerned about sexual morality? For a liberal to do so is the heights of hypocrisy. The entire liberal movement is based on the idea that what consenting adults do in private (at least if it involves sex) is fine.
But a little later on, Moran tells us what has him really upset--the color and economic status of the three men who were falsely accused:
As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives. There is a very large cushion under them--the one that softens the blows of life for most of those who go to Duke or similar places, and have connections through family, friends and school to all kinds of prospects for success. They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team.
So it is okay to falsely accuse them--they are white and privileged. Finally, Moran complains that his institution, the very, very liberal news media, aren't doing their job very well:
And, MOST IMPORTANT, there are many, many cases of prosecutorial misconduct across our country every year. The media covers few, if any, of these cases. Most of the victims in these cases are poor or minority Americans--or both. I would hate to say the color of their skin is one reason journalists do not focus on these victims of injustices perpetrated by police and prosecutors, but I am afraid if we ask ourselves the question honestly, we would likely find that it is.
Gee, the liberal news media don't bother to cover cases of prosecutorial misconduct--and this is a reason why it is okay for three boorish college students to be abused? Hey, if liberals aren't happy about prosecutorial misconduct aimed at poor and minority Americans, they can fix this--instead of yet another story about Anna Nicole Smith.
Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.
Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.
The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.
But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.
"Theoretically is it possible," Professor Nayernia said. "The problem is whether the sperm cells are functional or not. I don't think there is an ethical barrier, so long as it's safe. We are in the process of applying for ethical approval. We are preparing now to apply to use the existing bone marrow stem cell bank here in Newcastle. We need permission from the patient who supplied the bone marrow, the ethics committee and the hospital itself."
This is a bad idea, not simply because it would allow lesbians to break the last barrier to creating the society that Germaine Greer writes about, one without men, but because sexual reproduction is likely to have some genetic diversity advantages that this Brave, New World approach will not. Would the crossover of chromosomes happen in the same way, and as frequently, if the sperm cells were modified female stem cells? I'm not sure, but it at least sounds like a very risky approach.
Can you imagine if some scientist claimed to have discovered a way to create babies without women? There would be an understandable hostile reaction that this was just driven by misogyny.
Imagine if the literature that this group wanted to distribute in a public school was Heather Has Two Mommies. Somehow, I suspect the ACLU would be arguing for the right of free speech--not that the school may not allow someone to distribute it:
In February, we filed a complaint on behalf of two parents with children in the South Iron schools. We challenged the school district’s long-standing practice of allowing Gideons International to come into the fifth grade classrooms during mandatory class time to distribute bibles to the children.
In 2005, the Superintendent reversed the policy and indicated he would no longer allow the Gideons access to fifth-grade classrooms. Against the advice of the school attorney, the school’s insurance provider, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, and others, the School Board vote 4-3 to overrule the superintendent and mandate that the Gideons be provided access to the children. On October 4, 2005, the Gideons were allowed to come and distribute bibles to fifth-graders during class. Liberty Counsel, a right-wing religious group from Florida, is representing the defendants.
What is especially amusing is that immediately above that is this:
ST. LOUIS, March 22, 2007 - The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals today affirmed a lower court’s permanent injunction prohibiting the City of Columbia and the nonprofit corporation known as Memorial Day Weekend Salute to Veterans from restricting expressive activities at Columbia’s annual air show.
“Government restriction of free speech is always dangerous. We are gratified that the court agreed that the city cannot declare its air show a no-free-speech zone,” said Brenda Jones, executive director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri.
Yes, the situations aren't quite the same; one is a freedom of speech question, the other is the ACLU's ahistorical misunderstanding of the establishment clause. "Government restriction of free speech is always dangerous" except when those restrictions are aimed at religious speech.
If the ACLU took a consistent position against propaganda imposed on kids in public schools--such as the homosexual propaganda activities in Lexingt0n, Massachusetts (where the parents were not allowed to have their kids not exposed to the propaganda), I could have some respect for their position. But that's not the ACLU's position: it is that the government may impose non-religious propaganda on students, and parents can't opt out, but the government may not allow religious materials to be distributed.
Academia's Double Standard About Religion This story from Inside Higher Education is what I expect from the academic community:
There’s a plan, essentially, to install a basin. And a spigot.
And so the floodgates open.
Minneapolis Community and Technical College’s plan to install a washing basin where Muslim students can ritually wash their feet pre-prayer — and potentially to use tax dollars to fund said sink — came under fire Thursday after a Star Tribune columnist skewered the college for allegedly perpetuating a double standard in restricting Christian expression while facilitating Muslim prayer. The columnist Katherine Kersten describes a situation last year where “complaints and concerns” were raised when “[a] coffee cart that sells drinks and snacks played holiday music ‘tied to Christmas.’ ”
“College authorities quickly quashed the practice,” Kersten writes. “They appear to take a very different attitude toward Islam.”
The public scrutiny of course reflects a clash of cultures, particularly in a city with a growing Muslim population, where popular debate in recent months has focused on questions of whether Muslim taxicab drivers should have to transport passengers with alcohol and whether Muslim cashiers should have to scan bacon.
But beyond that, the plan to install a foot-washing basin also raises questions of church-state separation, and a college’s need to remain neutral while accommodating a growing segment of the student body — and in this case, at least, promoting safety.
“Over the last several years, as we’ve had increased immigration from folks from Africa and elsewhere who are also Muslim, we’ve found that their pre-prayer rituals, which include feet washing, often, have been an issue of concern with respect to safety,” says Phil Davis, president of Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Without a low-level washing facility available, students have typically resorted to placing their feet in the sinks of public restrooms, he says — creating a hazard both for themselves and students who then have to cross a wet floor. About 500 of the university’s 11,000 students are Muslim.
“Recently, a student who was washing her feet in the sink fell and was seriously injured. That brought renewed attention to this issue. We said, ‘Well, we think the most reasonable response, or at least a reasonable response, is to explore what kind of foot-washing resource we could provide to ensure the safety of our Muslim students and also those that come in behind them,’ ” Davis says.
At least 12 other public institutions offer foot-washing facilities to Muslim students, Davis says: A list provided by the college identifies California State University at Fullerton, the University of Houston, George Mason University, Harper Community College in Illinois and Eastern Michigan University, among others. “Our view is that we as a state agency cannot promote religion; we’re very clear about that,” says Davis. “At the same time, students at colleges and universities in America have the right to freely express their religious beliefs.... We think we have the very same standard for all students. That is, for example, when student clubs and organizations that are officially chartered ask for college space, we make that space available to the extent it is available.”
Shockingly enough, at least one of the extremists is actually willing to abide by their standards:
Yet, Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says that the Minneapolis college is in the wrong in this case. “I don’t think the constitution permits you buying an item or building a facility used exclusively by one religious group,” Lynn says. While President Davis says it’s unclear whether or not the college will end up using tax dollars to install the facility, Lynn says the college could risk breaching the separation between church and state regardless. “You’d have to show a willingness to open up whatever the space is, or a comparable space, for other items for religious use,” he says, referring to an ever-expanding standard of accommodation the college would have to meet if officials install a foot-washing basin for Muslim students. “Then you’d probably have to open it up to items for secular use.”
I am generally sympathetic to public institutions making accommodations for legitimate religious beliefs (as opposed to scams masquerading as religion), but the academic community has shown little willingness in this area with respect to Christianity; making an accommodation like this for Islam is just the academic community showing its hypocrisy and contempt for America.
Shocking Honesty From Prime Minister Blair If this keeps up, the entire British intellectual community will stamp its little feet until it disappears into the bowels of the Earth:
Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.
One accused him of misunderstanding the advice he had been given on the issue at a Downing Street summit.
Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it".
It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.
Mr Blair's remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.
Giving the Callaghan lecture in Cardiff, the prime minister admitted he had been "lurching into total frankness" in the final weeks of his premiership. He called on black people to lead the fight against knife crime. He said that "the black community - the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law abiding people horrified at what is happening - need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids".
Mr Blair said he had been moved to make his controversial remarks after speaking to a black pastor of a London church at a Downing Street knife crime summit, who said: "When are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it?" Mr Blair said there needed to be an "intense police focus" on the minority of young black Britons behind the gun and knife attacks. The laws on knife and gun gangs needed to be toughened and the ringleaders "taken out of circulation".
As you might expect, Blair is being denounced in the strongest terms for saying what no one dares admit. Britain keeps crime statistics broken down by race--but doesn't publish those breakdowns. There's a reason.
Poverty is a lousy excuse for what has gone wrong. Britain was vastly poorer, with essentially no "safety network" for the poor in 1900--and had much laxer gun laws than many American cities did at the time--and yet didn't have these murder rates. I don't know exactly why this self-destructive black culture has developed in both the United States and Britain, in spite of very different social welfare systems, legal systems, and gun control laws, but you have to be something of an idiot to pretend that there isn't something terribly broken in urban black communities in both Britain and America.
We have to stop pointing the finger everywhere but at the very people who prey on us each day. Over time we have allowed our value system to erode. We refuse to hold people accountable for their actions and constantly make excuses for their inexcusable behavior. The incessant cry for tougher gun laws is a good example. Until we're ready to strictly enforce the current laws there is no reason for tougher ones.
Yes, there is a need to work on the social ills at the core of much of the unrest, but that does not mean we should accept those ills as a reason to excuse the behavior. Those engaged in this violent lifestyle know exactly what they're doing. They also know it is wrong. And they also know there are no serious consequences for their actions. It's not a matter of not knowing right from wrong, it's a matter of weighing the risk. And today they face very little risk.
Time after time these budding killers are arrested with guns, only to be returned to the streets with a slap on the wrist. Is it any wonder we have trouble getting witnesses to speak up? Instead of holding vigils at murder scenes, groups like Men United for a Better Philadelphia and Mothers in Charge should throw a ring around the Criminal In-Justice Center and demand that our judges hold the criminals accountable.
More than 80 percent of Philadelphia's cold-blooded killers have criminal records. Most of those records are lengthy, many for violent crimes. Every one of those arrests represents an opportunity to send a clear message, before they take another life.
Joseph Fox
Chief of Detectives
Philadelphia Police Department
Philadelphia
It is letters like this that are why there are civil service protections. Without them, speaking truth to idiocy would be at least a career limiting move, if not a career ending one.
I've been looking for a table driven (in the interests of speed) implementation of CRC16 in C. There are plenty of examples out there, such as this one--but when I use it to calculate CRC16 for reference values, it doesn't give the correct CRC16 value, but instead produces CRC32 values.
I am reluctant to keep porting different wrong implementations of CRC16, in the hopes that one of them will generate the correct values. Can anyone point me to one that works? posted by Clayton at 11:58 AM permalink
Now, if Americans for Truth had selectively reproduced that flyer, or misrepresented its contents, there might be a basis to be upset about it. But they reproduced the entire flyer--and the contents of it--especially the gross and unhygenic parts--well, I've been seeing gay sex flyers like at college campuses in the Bay Area (often reproduced with my tax dollrs) for decades now.
If Progun Progressive doesn't want people to see stuff like this that makes homosexual men look like sickos, perhaps instead of attacking me and Americans for Truth for reproducing the flyer, he should be talking to gay men who think that this is appropriate behavior to be encouraging.
Imagine if gun control groups were reproducing NRA's Eddie Eagle firearms safety materials in full, and criticizing it. There might be some concerns about copyright violations, but our side wouldn't have much of a basis for complaining about the materials being accurately reproduced.
If you don't want people to go "ick" when you distribute flyers about "rimming," don't distribute flyers about it.
Francis S. Collins, one of the world's leading scientists who works at the cutting edge of DNA research, concluded that "there is an inescapable component of heritability to many human behavioral traits." However, he adds, "for virtually none of them, is heredity ever close to predictive."
In reviewing the heritability (i.e., influence of genetic factors) on personality traits, Dr. Collins referenced the research of Bochard and McGue for the estimated percentage of these traits that can be ascribed to heredity.
The heritability estimates for personality traits were varied: General Cognitive Ability (50%), Extroversion (54%), Agreeableness (42%), Conscientiousness (49%), Neuroticism (48%), Openness (57%), Aggression (38%) and Traditionalism (54%).
Such estimates of heritability are based upon unbiased, careful analyses of studies conducted with identical twins. The studies lead to the conclusion that heredity is important in many of these personality traits. It is important however, to note that even in such studies with identical twins, that heritability is not to be confused as inevitability.
As Dr. Collins would agree, environment can influence gene expression, and free will determines the response to whatever predispositions might be present.
Dr. Collins succinctly reviewed the research on homosexuality and offers the following:
"An area of particularly strong public interest is the genetic basis of homosexuality. Evidence from twin studies does in fact support the conclusion that heritable factors play a role in male homosexuality. However, the likelihood that the identical twin of a homosexual male will also be gay is about 20% (compared with 2-4 percent of males in the general population), indicating that sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations [emphasis added]."
Okay, I never saw the movie, but the title fits these pictures so well. Saturday morning I woke up to the sound of birds singing and beautiful sunshine, so I walked up to the back half of the property, what I used to call "Rhonda's Nature Preserve." I could see a bird sitting on one of the fenceposts, singing up a storm--but until it took flight, I couldn't tell what kind it was. It was moving pretty quickly, so the background blurred--but the bird itself I managed to freeze in mid-air! Yes, a redwing blackbird.
This picture I just took this evening as the sun set. It might look like a weird double exposure or a ghost picture, but the setting sun was illuminating the falling rain above one level, and not doing so below it.
This article makes me scratch my head and wonder about the sense of someone who would open fire on a National Guard tank:
BOISE, Idaho — For years, ATV-riding, gun-toting sport shooters have flouted gun laws in part of Idaho’s high desert by taking pot shots at ground squirrels and other animals.
Now, officials say, they’re also setting their sights on National Guard tanks that train in the area.
Rifles and pistols have been banned in a 68,000-acre area of the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area since 1996.
But the federal Bureau of Land Management is considering expanding the gun-restricted area by 41,000 acres to try to limit shootings at Idaho Army National Guard troops who report slugs bouncing off their tanks on a regular basis.
"There's a segment of the shooting community that will shoot at anything that moves," said John Sullivan, the area’s manager.
National Guard spokeswoman Lt. Col. Stephanie Dowling said she thinks the proposed expansion would help alleviate the problem.
"What’s happened over time, as the population has grown, we get more and more people out there," Dowling said. “Not everybody uses good safety precautions."
Oh boy, that is putting it mildly! It does raise some interesting legal questions.
If some idiot shoots a rifle at a tank--and the tank returns fire, does this qualify as self-defense? Or would the tank commander be liable because the idiot with the rifle has almost zero chance of causing injury? (Maybe if you had the hatch open and you had your head outside.)
If you shoot a rifle at a tank, does this qualify as assault with a deadly weapon, or would it be legally considered equivalent to firing a water pistol at someone? Whatever the law might be--this is a weird cross of impudence and stupidity.
REXBURG -- They'll have to cry in their soda pop in Rexburg from now on.
Miller's Hideaway, the only bar in this city of 43,000 residents, is out of business.
Owners Sherrie and Jim Miller said business had run dry by the time the place closed last March because they say police targeted customers leaving the lot for traffic stops.
Rexburg police say the Millers' repeated complaints during their 11 years of operation were unfounded.
Yeah, can you just imagine? Targeting people driving away from a bar for traffic stops? Why, next thing you know, the police will be stopping and searching people who run out of banks wearing Halloween masks!
It may be a surprise to someone who thinks it is cool to link to a magazine called Modern Drunkard, but there is some reason to think that there's a causal connection between drinking alcohol, then driving away, and being impaired. Not a guarantee, of course, but where are you more like to find people driving drunk? Leaving a bar? Or leaving church? I guess that we can call this "behavioral profiling," analogous to racial profiling.
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.
He makes a lot of points that the global warming fanatics don't want to hear:
April 16, 2007 issue - Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
I've been criticized repeatedly for making the point that an inability to forecast the weather with any accuracy next month does not give me confidence that global warming forecasts for decades in the future are even as good. And here's a professor of meterology--at MIT, no less--agreeing with me.
Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.
Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.
Gee, perhaps because whatever mankind is doing is small potatoes compared to what the sun is doing?
Just to annoy the anthropogenic global warming true believers, today's disturbing record cold data (as I watch hail fall outside my window in mid-April):
ATLANTA (AP) - An unseasonable cold snap put a chill on Easter Sunday services across the Southeast and much of the rest of the country, moving some events indoors and adding layers over spring frocks.
Even baseball had to take another time out - because of snow.
Across much of the eastern two-thirds of the nation, Easter celebrants swapped frills, bonnets and sandals for coats, scarves and heavy socks. Baseball fans huddled in blankets and, instead of spring planting, backyard gardeners were bundling their crops.
Two weeks into spring, Easter morning temperatures were in the upper 30s along the Gulf Coast and in the single digits in northern Minnesota and the Dakotas. Atlanta had a low of 30 degrees, with a wind chill of 23, the National Weather Service said. The same reading hit New York City's Fifth Avenue, celebrated in song for the traditional Easter Parade of spring finery.
Despite the chill, nearly 1,000 people attended the annual sunrise service at Georgia's Stone Mountain Park, as a slight breeze whipped over the granite monument. The service usually attracts 10,000.
Later in the afternoon, about 5,000 people braved the wind and chill in Homer, a small town in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains that claims one of the nation's largest Easter egg hunts.
"We've had cold weather before, but this might have been the coldest," said Sandra Garrison, whose family hid more than 100,000 plastic eggs on their farm, continuing a 48-year tradition. "They had their coats on for sure."
Nashville, Tenn., bottomed out Sunday at 23 degrees, knocking one degree off the Easter Sunday record set March 24, 1940.
An extra-cold winter on the Alaska Peninsula has frozen sea otters out of the bay and pushed them onto the tundra near Port Heiden where they're easy prey for wolves, humans and hunger.
Some of the starving animals -- with ribs showing -- have waddled or belly-slid several miles inland, residents said. Others have been attacked by dogs near houses, killed by villagers for their hides, or died on sea ice where eagles and foxes pick at their remains.
PHOENIX (AP) - Behind the county hospital's tall cinderblock walls, a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient sits in a jail cell equipped with a ventilation system that keeps germs from escaping. Robert Daniels has been locked up indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life, since last July. But he has not been charged with a crime. Instead, he suffers from an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. It is considered virtually untreatable.
County health authorities obtained a court order to lock him up as a danger to the public because he failed to take precautions to avoid infecting others. Specifically, he said he did not heed doctors' instructions to wear a mask in public.
"I'm being treated worse than an inmate," Daniels said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press last month. "I'm all alone. Four walls. Even the door to my room has been locked. I haven't seen my reflection in months."
Though Daniels' confinement is extremely rare, health experts say it is a situation that U.S. public health officials may have to confront more and more because of the spread of drug-resistant TB and the emergence of diseases such as SARS and avian flu in this increasingly interconnected world.
"Even though the rate of TB in the U.S. is at the lowest ever this last year, we live in a globalized world where, if anything emerges anywhere, it could come to our country right away," said Mark Harrington, executive director of the Treatment Action Group, an American advocacy group.
The World Health Organization warned last year of the emergence of extensively drug-resistant TB. The new strain, which has been found throughout the world, including pockets of the former Soviet Union and Asia, is resistant not only to the first line of TB drugs but to some second-line antibiotics as well.
HIV patients with weakened immune systems are especially susceptible. In South Africa, WHO reported that 52 of 53 HIV patients died within an average of 25 days after it was discovered they also had XDR-TB.
Michael Williams points out that there's nothing novel about this use of quarantine laws for communicable diseases, and argues that if a hard to cure usually fatal disease like this justifies quarantine, the same should be true for incurable always fatal diseases:
By this same logic, could a person with HIV/AIDS be locked up if he/she refused to avoid engaging in risky sexual behavior that put others at risk of infection? Such measures might actually make it possible to curb the spread of the terrible disease.
Not surprisingly, because of the obvious applicability of this approach to people who are intentionally exposing others to AIDS, the usual screeching is well under way:
Dr. Ross Upshur, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto, said authorities should detain people with drug-resistant tuberculosis if they are uncooperative.
"We're on the verge of taking what was a curable disease, one of the best known diseases in human endeavors, and making it incurable," Upshur said.
But a paper Upshur co-wrote on the issue in a medical journal earlier this year has been strongly criticized.
"Involuntary detention should really be your last resort," Harrington said. "There's a danger that we'll end up blaming the victim."
Uh, no. The problem in this case was that the patient refused to follow his doctor's orders to reduce the risk of exposing others to XDR-TB. The analogy to "Typhoid Mary," who carried typhoid fever, and continued working in food service even after she was told that she was killing others, seems quite exact. She was locked up for life not because she was sick, but because she went back to working as a cook after her release from quarantine.
Not surprisingly, the comments over at Michael Williams' blog include a gay man arguing that while locking up people who are infectious and intentionally infecting others is okay, this is a different matter if the disease is AIDS:
I wouldn't say I'm against locking up "any" infectious person. In the case of HIV/AIDS, yes.. I am against that.
Once again, all the rules change if it is involves homosexuality.
It turns out that the washer that I need to make is best done by punching .010" polypropylene sheet. There is a tool called a "hollow punch" or "arch punch" that does what I need, available in sizes as large as 2" inside diameter. The large sizes are somewhat expensive, but a company called Allpax builds a variant that lets you put both inside and outside cutters in a tool and punch both both the inner circle and the outer circle in one operation. It appears to be an expensive set of punches, but perhaps if I only buy the two parts I need to cut a 2" OD and 7/16" ID at the same time, it won't be so bad.
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate and sensible thing to do, and there is no government involvement. I wonder how long it will take for the ACLU to decide that a private organization gathering information about those who want to impose sharia law is improper?
The Society of Americans for National Existence, or SANE, has launched the "Mapping Sharia in America Project," which is aimed at sending Arabic-speaking agents into the 2,000 mosques and Islamic day schools in the United States to learn what kind of doctrine is being preached. SANE president David Yerushalmi explains says the objective is to determine if those Islamic establishments are teaching complete obedience to sharia law.
"We're going to go into the mosques ... we're going to go into the day schools, [and] we're going to get the literature, we're going to listen to the courses, and we're going to rate them," says Yerushalmi. A rating of zero will indicate no sharia being taught; a rating of 10, says the group, will imply it is being taught at "al-Qaeda level."
"If it is an orthodox, meaning a traditional, historical Islam [being taught], it preaches sharia and it's dangerous," SANE's president continues; "and the reason is because as a matter of doctrine, you cannot tolerate a Western nation-state run with a constitutional republic [that is] not based on Islamic law. That's the fundamental principle."
Yerushalmi says while there may a few mosques and day schools that reject Sharia law, they are few and far between. "Because every Muslim who would stand up and make a case for form is subject to a death threat, only the smallest, fewest, bravest of the Muslims have publicly rejected Islam," he contends.
