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BERLIN, Germany (UPI) -- Germany has launched a massive computer-aided project to reconstruct files torn to pieces by former East Germany`s Stasi secret police, raising hopes that more communist wrongdoings can be brought to the surface. In the final days of the communist German Democratic Republic, when the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, still had control of its own buildings, the secret police began destroying as many files as they could. Stasi officers burned, shredded and manually tore up documents that may have revealed state secrets or incriminated them and their superiors. While the burned files are lost forever, West German police were able to secure more than 16,000 sacks of hand-torn paper, the largest scraps being roughly postcard size. After Germany`s reunification, Berlin vowed to reassemble the scraps as part of a greater effort to prosecute former Stasi wrongdoings and come to terms with the country`s communist past. Some 10 workers since 1995 have been manually gluing together the scraps in an office near Nuremberg, said Ilona Schaekel, spokeswoman of the BSTU, a federal agency created in the early 1990s to collect the Stasi files and organize their release to the public. 'Of the more than 16,000 sacks, 320 have been reconstructed since 1995,' she told United Press International Thursday in a telephone interview. 'At that rate it would take us hundreds of years until we`re finished.' The new pilot project, spearheaded by a team of scientists from the Berlin-based Fraunhofer Institute for Production Machinery and Building Technology, hopes to digitalize and thus significantly speed up that process. The German government has allocated some $8.5 million in federal funds over the next two years for the highly ambitious project that aims to see if it`s feasible to digitally reassemble the roughly 600 million scraps to an estimated 45 million pages. The sheer amount of potentially recoverable Stasi secrets excites even the cool-headed Fraunhofer scientists. 'To have that many potentially recoverable files from a former dictatorship is unique in the world,' Bertram Nickolay, head of the Stasi files reassembling program at the Fraunhofer, told UPI. 'This unique challenge requires a unique solution.' The Fraunhofer Institute is the only group in the world that has championed the digital jigsaw process. According to its method, a conveyor belt feeds the scraps into digital scanners that scan images of both sides of the paper. The Fraunhofer software then identifies the paper (lined or white-background) and its typefaces, any rubber stamps and the outlines of the tears. Then, like a jigsaw puzzle solver, it digitally puts together the scraps when it discovers matching edges. Over the next two years the institute aims to reassemble the contents of roughly 400 sacks. Schaekel, of the government agency, said Berlin hopes to uncover more Stasi wrongdoings, as the manually assembled scraps had already unearthed famous Stasi informants` files previously thought to be lost. Officials believe the manually torn files contain 'relevant information' on other informants, but also on victims and other intelligence measures. Our individual right to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, may finally be confirmed by the high court; but this means that we're going to see increasing pressure on the Supreme Court from anti-gun rights activists who want the Constitution reinterpreted to fit their prejudices. The New York Times has already fired the first broadside. A few days ago, the Gray Lady published a fascinating account of the case -- fascinating but fundamentally flawed. In it, the central argument about the Second Amendment is pretty accurately described. Specifically, it is between those who see it as an individual right versus those who see it as a collective states' right having more to do with the National Guard than the people. Unfortunately, the article falsely portrays the individual right argument as some new interpretation held only by a few fringe theorists. The truth is very different, as civil rights attorney and gun law expert Don Kates has pointed out recently. From the enactment of the Bill of Rights in 1791 until the 20th Century, no one seriously argued that the Second Amendment dealt with anything but an individual right -- along with all other nine original amendments. Kates writes that not one court or commentator denied it was a right of individual gun owners until the last century. Judges and commentators in the 18th and 19th century routinely described the Second Amendment as a right of individuals. And they expressly compared it to the other rights such as speech, religion, and jury trial. The Times has simply replayed theories invented by the 20th century gun control movement. Their painting of the individual right interpretation as a minority view is equally fanciful. Kates writes that, "Over 120 law review articles have addressed the Second Amendment since 1980. The overwhelming majority affirm that it guarantees a right of individual gun owners. That is why the individual right view is called the 'standard model' view by supporters and opponents alike. With virtually no exceptions, the few articles to the contrary have been written by gun control advocates, mostly by people in the pay of the anti-gun lobby." Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, gun rights Labels: cars Labels: terrorism Labels: Iraqi WMDs, terrorism A federal appeals court ordered a South Carolina school district to pay nearly $100,000 in attorneys' fees and other damages for discriminating against Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), which sponsors Good News Clubs in public schools. Anderson School District Five waived a facilities fee for groups including the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, the local Democratic Party and a host of other groups, but charged CEF. Officials claimed they waived the fee when it was "in the best interest of the district." The appeals court ruled the district policy unconstitutional, saying the "government may not bar religious perspectives." "Communities of faith may not be arbitrarily excluded from the protections of the Free Speech Clause," the justices wrote. "Government need not fear an Establishment Clause violation from allowing religious groups to speak under the same reasonable, viewpoint-neutral terms as other private parties." Labels: freedom of religion Labels: gun rights, welcome to Idaho Labels: cars Labels: terrorism Mark Malloch Brown spoke Monday to a crowded auditorium at the World Bank's headquarters, warning that the bank's mission was "hugely at risk" as long as Paul Wolfowitz remained its president. Only hours earlier, news leaked that a special committee investigating Mr. Wolfowitz had accused him of violating conflict-of-interest rules. A coincidence? We doubt it. Mr. Malloch Brown, remember, was until last year Kofi Annan's deputy at the United Nations. In that position, he distinguished himself by spinning away the $100 billion Oil for Food scandal as little more than a blip in the U.N.'s good work, and one that had little to do with Mr. Annan himself. Last week, Mr. Malloch Brown was named vice president of the Quantum Fund, the hedge fund run by his billionaire friend George Soros. A former World Bank official himself and ally of soon-to-be British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mr. Malloch Brown would almost surely be a leading candidate to replace Mr. Wolfowitz should he step down. Not surprisingly, Gordon Brown cold-shouldered Mr. Wolfowitz at a recent meeting in Brussels. The bank presidency would be a neat coup for Sir Mark, and not just because the post has heretofore gone to an American. He also stands for everything Mr. Wolfowitz opposes, beginning with the issue of corruption. Consider Mr. Malloch Brown's defense of the U.N.'s procurement practices. "Not a penny was lost from the organization," he insisted last year, following an audit of the U.N.'s peacekeeping procurement by its Office of Internal Oversight Services. In fact, the office found that $7 million had been lost from overpayment; $50 million worth of contracts showed indications of bid rigging; $61 million had bypassed U.N. rules; $82 million had been lost to mismanagement; and $110 million had "insufficient" justification. That's $310 million out of a budget of $1.6 billion, and who knows what the auditors missed. ... So it's not surprising that many on the World Bank staff would cheer Mr. Malloch Brown: He's perfect for an institutional culture in which "progressive" thinking goes hand-in-glove with a tolerance for corruption. That culture has been on vivid display in the Euro-coup against Mr. Wolfowitz. This weekend the committee investigating the claims dropped 600 pages in the president's lap and told him he had 48 hours to respond--in direct violation of World Bank staff rule 8.01, 4.09, which states that "the amount of time allowed a staff member to comment [on an investigative report] . . . will not be less than 5 business days." Following protests from Mr. Wolfowitz's lawyer, the committee gave him 72 hours. This is the same kangaroo court that last month leaked its guilty verdict to the Washington Post before Mr. Wolfowitz even had a chance to plead his case. Our sources who have seen the committee's report tell us it is especially critical of Mr. Wolfowitz for daring to object publicly to the committee's methods and thereby bringing the bank's name into disrepute. The Europeans running this Red Queen proceeding prefer that they be able to smear with selective leaks without rebuttal. Labels: Soros Labels: terrorism Now, however, the ACLU is endorsing a federal bill banning “hate crimes” based on sexual orientation, sex, race, religion, and disability. Apparently, while the ACLU believes that criminals in general should receive every constitutional protection imaginable (and many protections that have no basis in the Constitution: the ACLU opposes the death penalty, “three-strikes” laws, victims’ bills of rights, and the building of many new prisons), it believes that those accused of “hate crimes” are not entitled to the constitutional protection against double jeopardy. Labels: ACLU, homosexuality Labels: my books Rather than requesting help, or reassuring the victims, or for that matter even showing much in the way of leadership, Governor Sibelius immediately went out of her way to turn the tornado into a political statement. “The rebuilding effort in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas, likely will be hampered because some much-needed equipment is in Iraq, said that state’s governor.” “Governor Kathleen Sebelius said much of the National Guard equipment usually positioned around the state to respond to emergencies is gone. She said not having immediate access to things like tents, trucks and semitrailers will really handicap the rebuilding effort.” “The Kansas National Guard has about 40 percent of the equipment it is allotted because much of it has been sent to Iraq.” Those lying Bush-bots in The National Guard Bureau are disputing her truthiness to a fare-thee-well. “Currently, the Kansas National Guard has 88 percent of its forces available, 60 percent of its Army Guard dual-use equipment on hand, and more than 85 percent of its Air Guard equipment on hand, said Randal Noller, public affairs officer for the National Guard Bureau. Under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which is a national partnership agreement that allows state-to-state assistance during governor or federally declared emergencies, Kansas has more than 400,000 Guardsmen available to it, he pointed out. However, Kansas has not yet requested assistance from other states.” Labels: gun rights Labels: deinstitutionalization In her introduction, El-Haj explains that she works by “rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method,” writing, instead, within a scholarly tradition of “post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory and … in response to specific postcolonial political movements.” And the particular theory that El-Haj puts forward is that the “ancient Israelite origins” of the Jews is a “pure political fabrication” – a machination she proceeds to blame on “Israeli archaeologists” who were called upon to “produce … evidence of ancient Israelite and Jewish presence in the land of Israel, thereby supplying the very foundation, embodied in empirical form, of the modern nation’s origin myth.” Deplorably, in the rarified air of There's just too much historical and archaeological evidence that Jews occupied what is now Palestine for more than a thousand years until the Roman destruction of the second Temple. Is it possible that there is no longer a purpose to institutions of higher learning, when garbage like this starts to become acceptable? As Classical Values observes: Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization, political correctness Labels: political correctness Labels: freedom of speech, political correctness Labels: terrorism Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Labels: enviromental lunacy Labels: hypocrisy Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: welcome to Idaho
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).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Michael Williams -- Master of None
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A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
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Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
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Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
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Putting Computers to Good Use
From Monsters & Critics, this interesting news story about computers and jigsaw puzzles:
Reasons to Vote For Fred Thompson
He quotes my friends:
Warning to GM Owners
Apparently the cause of the failure of the fuel gauge sending unit is because sulfur in gasoline is attacking the sending units. The service writer showed me the sending unit, and where the contacts had turned black from sulfuration of the metal. GM has apparently sent out a technical advisory to dealers about the importance of using GM's fuel treatment every 3000 miles to protect the sending units. Corvettes seem to be especially prone to this problem--and wow, is it expensive on a Corvette to have done!
UPDATE: A reader tells me that GM's fuel treatment is really just Techron's fuel treatment, with a GM label and twice the price. I look here, and even the weird shape of the bottle is identical.
What's News, What Isn't
Three retired generals came against the war, and this was big news. But 2700 active duty military in Iraq--you know, the ones with the most to personally gain by coming home--signed a petition saying to stay the course--and the news media ignore it.
The American news media aren't anti-war; they're just on the other side.
A Fascinating Article
I've blogged in the past about the evidence that indeed, there were WMDs in Iraq just before the U.S. invaded--and we did find scattered remnants. What has mystified me is why the Bush Administration has made no serious effort to use this information to demonstrate that they weren't lying. A reader pointed me to this fascinating article that might explain why. It references an article in the British magazine The Spectator, but the article, unfortunately, is subscription only now. Still, this article from something called The Trumpet makes me wonder if this "axis of embarrassment" might be the answer:The memoirs of former Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet went on sale Monday, generating a mass of debate and media coverage—once again—about the part that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (or lack thereof) played in the instigation of the war in Iraq.
Could it be, however, that the real debate is being missed? Amid all the controversy, backpedaling and duplicity surrounding the subject, are the real questions being asked and answered? Evidence suggests there may exist a far more deadly cover-up that could yet have future impact, the debate of which fits the agenda of neither the liberal media, nor the government.
The assumption the whole public debate is built upon is that no evidence of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons was ever found to justify the stated reason for the invasion of Iraq.
“Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong,” Britain’s Spectator magazine reported April 21. Saddam’s wmd did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s wmd to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.
Before you dismiss this bold assertion out of hand, consider from where it comes. Dave Gaubatz is a counterterrorism specialist and Arabic linguist, having served as an agent in the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations for 12 years and worked on assignments in several Middle Eastern countries. In 2003, he was specially selected for a position in Iraq. His assignment was to track down suspected wmd sites, in addition to pinpointing threats to U.S. forces in the area and hunting down Saddam loyalists. “Mr. Gaubatz is not some marginal figure,” writes the Spectator. “He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.”
In 2003, Gaubatz found four sites in southern Iraq that he is convinced contained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in addition to material for a nuclear program and missiles prohibited by the United Nations. Independently gained and agreeing testimony from numerous Iraqi sources was substantiated by what Gaubatz found on the ground. The four sites were massive, and great care had been taken to conceal them: Three were bunkers built underneath the Euphrates river bed, with reinforced concrete walls 5 feet thick. “There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these constructions, that something very important was buried there,” said Gaubatz.
Iraqi informants “explained in detail why wmds were in these areas and asked the U.S. to remove them,” said Gaubatz. “Much of this material had been buried in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity—gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that wmds were hidden there.”
Further supporting the claims, the medical records of Gaubatz and his team revealed that they had been exposed to high levels of radiation at these sites.
When Gaubatz reported his findings to the Iraq Study Group, he was told it lacked the necessary manpower and equipment to break into and examine the underground sites.
Others, however, appearing to place a higher value on what was contained in these bunkers, apparently did not lack the needed manpower and equipment. Gaubatz subsequently found out from Iraqi, cia and British intelligence that the wmd had been excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with Russia’s help, and transferred to Syria. “The worst-case scenario has now come about,” writes the Spectator. “Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state—and one with close links to Iran.”
Attempts since then by Mr. Gaubatz and several other concerned parties, including two congressmen, for the claims to be investigated have been stonewalled, with the Defense Department and cia refusing to provide information. What’s more, all 60 of Gaubatz’s classified intelligence reports, submitted in 2003, reportedly went missing.
The Spectator states why the issue is such a political hot potato: The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralize the danger of Iraqi wmd. The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.
What A Shocker! Religious Groups Deserve Equal Treatment Under the Law!
I am always amazed at how ferociously hostile to Christianity schools are, even in the Bible Belt:
They Really Should Warn You That The City Has A Gun Control Ordinance
I mean, I don't actually live in Horseshoe Bend, and it wouldn't be a big problem anyway, but I did find that back in February of 2001, Horseshoe Bend, Idaho passed Ordinance #186-2001: "Ordinance for Civil Emergencies and Establishing Right to Maintain Firearms."1. In order to provide for the emergency management of the town, and to provide for the civil defense of the City of Horseshoe Bend, and further, in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the town and its inhabitants, every head of household residing in the City of Horseshoe Bend city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefor.
2. Exempt from the effect of this section are those who suffer a physical or mental disability, which would prohibit them from using or obtaining such firearms. Further exempt from the effect of this section are those who are persons under the law who are restrained from possessing a firearm/firearms, such as a felon, or one who is under court restrictino such as a restraining order to disallow possession of firearms.
3. Exempt from the effect of said ordinance are those who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of belief, religious doctrine, or who are financially unable to purchase a firearm.
Corvette and Extended Warranty
I mentioned last week that I had bought a very long term extended warranty for the Corvette back in 2002. It just paid for itself with one repair. The fuel gauge has been intermittently reporting no gas, and then sometimes starting to work again. It turned into a hard failure last week, so I went into the dealer--and it turns out that this is about a $2000 repair. Why?
It turns out that the Corvette actually has two gas tanks, one of which feeds the other, which in turn feeds the engine. I suspect that someone didn't want the gasoline sloshing around in a single tank, causing sudden and unexpected swings of weight over the rear axle. But this means that there are two fuel pumps tied into the fuel sensor.
The extended warranty company (which I won't name until they've paid the bill) has been making this as difficult as possible, probably because they weren't expecting this to be so expensive. On most Chevrolets, a repair like this would be a few hundred dollars--not $2000.
I am beginning to wonder if I should plan on selling the Corvette when the extended warranty expires in September 2008. I love the car, but I do need a 4WD or AWD or winter driving--and maybe it makes more sense to look for something that can accomplish both ends. Is there something like a Subaru WRX that doesn't suffer from the boy racer look? (Yeah, the Corvette isn't exactly subtle, but it's a sophisticated sports car look, not a "I'm 19, and look at the obnoxious car that I bought" look.)
U.S. Media Aren't Covering This Story
A friend in San Francisco sent me a news story from AlterNet that no other U.S. media are covering--that a majority of the Iraqi Parliament now wants us to leave. Indeed, no other U.S. media are covering this story, except those pointing to AlterNet's story:On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.
There's a little problem. Not only are no U.S. media covering it--but it seems that no non-U.S. media are covering it, either, not even the leftist newspapers in Europe. At least, when I search for the combination of Iraqi, Parliament and petition in news.google.com, it finds AlterNet's story, and a couple of others that link to it--and that seems to be it.
If this were true, it would be a sign that it's time to leave. But when the overwhelmingly hostile news media of the world aren't covering such a story, it inclines me to think the story isn't true.
Is George Soros Behind Everything?
This editorial in the Wall Street Journal indicates that the current fuss at the World Bank about Paul Wolfowitz's supposed problems (which sound like Wolfowitz tried to recuse himself from his girlfriend's promotion but they wouldn't let him do so) indicates that some of this is being driven by George Soros:
Mr. Malloch Brown never made any serious attempt to reform the U.N. beyond the cosmetic, while doing everything he could to block the real reforms proposed by Americans Christopher Burnham and former Ambassador John Bolton. He was, however, energetic when it came to lecturing Americans about what they owed the U.N., such as joining the "reformed" Human Rights Council (whose only achievement to date has been to castigate Israel), pursuing a "new multilateral national security," and otherwise empowering the likes of Mr. Malloch Brown, his multilateral mates and their tax-free salaries.
The Fort Dix Plot
I can see why the ACLU is so fearful of surveillance of foreign phone calls that end up in the United States. It might expose plots like the one described in this affidavit. A number of interesting points.
On page 7, we find out that several of those involved were identified early on by the FBI as being illegally in the United States. All the more reason why we should be, you know, requiring people to obey the laws about entry to the U.S.!
Page 9 mentions that several of the conspirators had to drive long distances to shoot, because not being legally in the U.S., they could not use commercial shooting ranges. This is fascinating--and suggests that we should give a big hand to ranges in that part of New Jersey who seem to be doing more than the law requires.
While page 11 makes reference to the ability to get hold of machine guns, although not from a store, because they are illegal, page 13, 14, and 22 show that this was anywhere near as easy as they expected. Even buying conventional firearms, as page 18 shows, because they lacked green cards, turned out to be a good bit harder then expected. I thought from the way that the gun control advocates talked, any criminal could buy anything and everything at gun shows--but these guys were having a surprisingly hard time doing so, and they were, shall we say, highly motivated bad guys.
Gee, Why Did The ACLU Change Its Tune About Hate Crimes?
Hans Bader points out that historically, the ACLU has expressed concern about federal hate crimes statutes because of the danger of double jeopardy--where a person might be tried (and perhaps found innocent) of a violent crime under a state law against assault, and then be tried again under federal charges for civil rights violations. See footnote 189 here to see how the ACLU took a principled position on this with respect to the federal prosecution of police officers in the Rodney King case.
As Bader points out:
Hmmm. This statute, for the first time, includes sexual orientation among the groups to enjoy the benefit of extra protection of federal hate crimes legislation. (If someone beats you to a pulp because they think you have $20 in wallet, that's just not important enough to get federal prosecution.)
The ACLU has given no reason for its unprincipled about-face on double-jeopardy protections. But ACLU leader Paul Hoffman gave a possible explanation years ago in urging the ACLU to create a “civil rights exception” that would deny double-jeopardy protections to people accused of hate crimes. Writing in the 1994 edition of the UCLA Law Review, Hoffman argued that constitutional protections against double jeopardy should be overridden in hate crimes cases, because society has a “compelling societal interest” in preventing hate crimes (by contrast, Hoffman apparently saw no compelling interest in preventing non-hate crimes, even murders).
I went to the ACLU's site to see how they would justify their actions, and they completely avoided any mention of the question of double jeopardy. But I think I see why their principles suddenly changed. Take a look at the address of the page where they endorse this measure: http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/gen/29605prs20070503.html and you can figure it out pretty quickly. The letters lgbt are an acronym for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual." The ACLU's favorite minority group gets the benefit of the statute--and thus the ACLU's traditional concerns about double jeopardy are gone.
It Doesn't Matter What You Say About Me...
as long as you spell my name right. Or at least, that's the traditional publicity agent's view of things. The Idaho World, Idaho's oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1863) had a very nice piece about me in the May 2, 2007 issue, on page 2, "Horseshoe Bend Author Publishes Sixth Book." There were a few very minor mistakes--of which the only really glaring one was a fairly consistent misspelling of my last name as "Crammer."
Oh well, that's life!
Someone has a sense of humor at the Idaho World. In the help wanted section of the paper:The Idaho World is seeking a part time reporter for the Garden Valley Area. Pay is miserable, hours are horrendous, privacy is non-existant, burn-out guaranteed, but if you like meeting new and interesting people and exploring different subjects, you'll love it.
Blaming the Iraq War For Kansas's Problems
I saw some mention yesterday of complaints that Kansas National Guard assets in Iraq meant that Kansas was having trouble dealing with the recent tornado problems. This blogger has some detailed knowledge of how the National Guard keeps its equipment, and essentially says that Governor Sibelius's attempts to shift blame onto the Iraq War are wrong:
Good News: Parker v. D.C. Denied En Banc Hearing
I just received an email from Robert A. Levy with the Cato Institute that the District of Columbia's request for an en banc appeal has been denied. An en banc hearing is when a larger group of judges at the appeals court level rehears a decision made by the usual three judge panel. In this case, the District of Columbia's only options are:
1. Accept the D.C. Court of Appeals decision, and strike down big chunks of their gun control law.
2. Appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Inappropriate Institutionalization
One of the claimed arguments for reform of involuntary commitment laws in the 1960s was that people were being locked up in mental hospitals who were not actually mentally ill, but simply eccentric or inconvenient. I don't find it impossible to believe, and at least one of the landmark cases, O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975), was such a case. The parents arranged to get their adult son hospitalized with no apparent evidence of mental illness.
How common was this? If there were large numbers of such cases, then the reform movement made sense. Does anyone know of any statistical measures of the number of such inappropriate institutionalization cases there were?
Collapsing The Traditional Distinction Between History and Theory
There was a time that this article from Front Page magazine about a professor who is arguing that that there is no evidence that Jews ever occupied Palestine would have shocked me. No longer.This all leaves me wondering.... If crackpots who spout Israelite denial can get tenure, what's next? Will Barnard and Columbia start offering courses in Holocaust Denial Studies? (A department, perhaps?)
Political Correctness at Sonoma State University
A friend is attending there, and reports:There's an online "climate" (apparently in the sense of incidence of situations which someone, especially protected categories, might take offense to, rather than long-term weather trends) survey that they want people to fill out. It has checkboxes for various categories. Look at the nomenclature and ordering for this one:
Q7 My sexual orientation is:
Despite this piece of weirdly ordered elaboration, they have no category for mixed ethnic background, only "Other".
Ways To Get Fired From a College
Send out an historical document. From Inside Higher Education, May 8, 2007:Just before last Thanksgiving, Walter Kehowski decided to share some wishes with his colleagues at Glendale Community College. The tenured mathematics professor used a faculty announcement e-mail list to send George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789. The e-mail that Kehowski sent also indicated his source: the blog of Pat Buchanan.
Something tells me that even more offensive than including a link to Pat Buchanan's blog was the content of that message--which, being from George Washington, makes reference to "Almighty God." That's one way to lose a tenured position!
That e-mail could end up costing Kehowski his job, according to documents released Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is now advising Kehwoski. According to those documents, five employees in the Maricopa Community College District — of which Glendale is a part — filed complaints against him, charging that including a link to Buchanan’s Web site (even citing it as the source for the proclamation) was harassment because of the anti-immigration views expressed by Buchanan on his Web site.
Kehowski has been placed on leave and his termination has been recommended to the Maricopa board — although the professor is asserting his right to appeal that recommendation. The charges on which he was found guilty with regard to the George Washington e-mail include violating the district’s equal opportunity policy and breaking a rule against posting non-work related items on the announcements e-mail list.
...
Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE... said that it would not raise First Amendment issues for a college to restrict an e-mail list to work-related material in a way that would exclude postings like the Thanksgiving message. But he said that the same listserv for which the Thanksgiving posting is being punished had previously included postings on topics that included an advertisement for purchasing goats for orphans in Uganda, quotes about Women’s History Month, and a discussion of the health benefits of eating bananas.
The Iraq War
While it is certainly true that the left has worked hard, and to good effect, to make sure that we lose the Iraq War, there comes a certain moment when we have to put some of the blame for this on the Bush Administration. It is apparent that they made very serious mistakes on the occupation. Some of those mistakes were hard choices, such as whether to disband the Iraqi Army or not right after the war. No matter what choice we made, there might have been bad consequences.
Other choices were inexplicable errors--the refusal to seal the borders. At this point, this would still be a good call, but the damage is done.
I suspect that the pictures of the Abu Ghraib crimes were leaked as part of some attempt by the defense attorneys to get their clients off. As much as it bothers me to think of these sleazebags getting away with this, in the long run, letting them out of the military quietly would have been better than the enormous damage done to the United States and the Iraq occupation by having them publicly available.
I am wondering what the rules of engagement are now. One of my wife's students has a son in Special Ops in Iraq--and they are now obligated to knock on the door before entering when hunting for terrorists. Maybe there's a good reason for this, to build up good will among the Iraqis, but her son thinks this is crazy.
This Is Insane: The Democrats Want to Pay Reparations for War Crimes By Other Nations
Michelle Malkin pointed to this bill that would compensate residents of Guam for crimes committed against them by the Japanese government during World War II.
What next? Are we going to compensate Holocaust survivors for the Holocaust because we didn't come to their aid faster, or failed to allow them admission before World War II? Are we going to compensate Filipinos for Japanese atrocities during World War II? The Philipines was still part of the United States at the time, and a heck of a lot of Filipinos paid dearly in lives, rape, and torture in resisting the Japanese.
My Mind Just Spins At This Weirdness
I saw this posting over at Reflections, Reflections, which claimed that William Saletan's review of the documentary Zoo (about people with intimate relationships with animals):William Saletan reaches the absurd level of trying to equate bestiality to heterosexuality (which he constructs as all bad), and states that it is the opposite of homosexuality (which he constructs as all good). Yes, you read that right.
My first reaction was, "Okay, the young lady in question must have reacted very negatively to some subtle point that Saletan was trying to make, and misread him."
Nope. You can read Saletan's review of Zoo here, if you have the stomach for it. I'm afraid that Reflections, Reflections got Saletan's review right.
UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more irritated I get, not just because of its offensive comparison of heterosexuality to bestiality, but the misogny that Saletan's review includes.
One of the traditional stereotypes of homosexual men is that they hate women. While I've met a few misogynous gay men over the years, most gay men I have worked with seemed to have no problem with women. On the other hand, I've seen the claim made that the reason why there were two separate gay Democratic clubs in San Francisco--a gay man's club and a lesbian club--was that for many years there was too much tension (and not sexual tension) between gay men and lesbians to work together.
But Saletan makes it very clear that not only does he see bestiality as heterosexuality--because of "difference" but that the horses in question are like women--strictly for sex, because they really aren't up to an equal relationship:
But Zoo isn't about equality. It's about inequality. It gets inside the heads of the horse fetishists, exploring their peculiar mentality. At the core of that mentality is a craving for otherness. Zoophilia isn't homo. It's hetero. Very hetero.
If there is anything that better typifies Saletan's misogny than this, I don't what it is. Rather than try to justify what these sick guys are doing as "just another expression of human sexuality," he specifically compares it to heterosexuality--and women, in a heterosexual relationship, are dumb animals, unable to ever be on an equal plane with men. I don't know what Saletan's sexual orientation is, but I think I can make a guess.
The men in the movie think their trysts are meaningful. "It's the love of animals—that's what zoophilia is," says one, a ranch hand who goes by his Internet alias, H. "It's just like if you love your wife." Another, who calls himself the Happy Horseman, ventures, "You're connecting with another intelligent being."
But the more the men talk, the more this pretense unravels. "I don't need a high level of emotional interaction," says a zoophile who goes by the name Coyote. The Happy Horseman agrees. A horse "has no idea what Tolstoy is, or Keats," he explains. "You can't discuss the difference between Monet and Picasso. That just doesn't exist for their world. It's a simpler, very plain world. And for those few moments, you kind of can get disconnected."
In other words, horses are bimbos. The ranch where the men gathered for equine sex, nestled under a mountain in the Pacific Northwest, was a place to get away from failed marriages and friendships. For some, the Happy Horseman recalls, going there meant, "I don't have to really deal with relationships."
Why Do People Starve To Death in America?
These articles appeared in the Portland Oregonian in December of 2002 as part of a series about the failure of the Oregon public mental health system. Since I'm writing about the failure of deinstitutionalization, these tragedies are examples of where Oregon's involuntary commitment law failed--and failed in a way that scarcely seems believable:In at least 28 cases, people died after mental health professionals failed to push involuntary hospitalization, despite clear signs that their clients were dangerous to themselves, others or were unable to survive in the near future. Any of those conditions allow mental health workers to seek commitment of a mentally ill person.
Here's one of the cases where the commitment law was the entire problem:
Sometimes the mentally ill were denied hospitalization because of a statewide shortage of psychiatric beds. Other times, county mental health workers didn't know how to use the law. In a few of those cases, county workers tried, but judges refused to involuntarily commit, seriously ill people because of Oregon's high legal standard. The painful life and tragic death of Mary Boos, a Portland woman with paranoid schizophrenia, is one such case.
Mental health workers, her parents and two court psychiatrists agreed that Boos, 40, was in grave danger and should be hospitalized. A judge, not Lawrence, refused, saying her case didn't meet Oregon's standard, under which a person must be a danger to herself, others or unable to provide for her basic personal needs. The Oregon Court of Appeals has told judges not to force patients into treatment unless they are unable to "survive in the near future."
Boos lived 10 more months. But without treatment, she sank so deeply into her delusions that she would not leave her apartment. She would not eat the food her parents faithfully and frantically set outside the door no law could make her open. Her decomposing remains were found almost a year later on Oct. 20, 1997. The medical examiner ruled she died of "natural causes probably related to schizophrenia." In other words, she starved to death.
More About The Problems of Mental Illness and Firearms Background Checks
This article from the May 6, 2007 Kansas City Star discusses the problems of mental illness and firearms background checks:Enforcement of the federal prohibition on firearms for people judged “mental defective” varies from state to state — ranging from nonexistent to practically impossible to cross-your-fingers. Some jurisdictions, including Kansas and Missouri, are only now working to close gaping holes in their laws.
There are some real issues here. What is the dividing line between someone who is having some emotional problems and someone who is a danger to himself or others? I can understand the concern of mental health professionals, who don't want someone to resist hospitalization for fear of being disarmed later on. My thought is that the proper dividing line is voluntary vs. involuntary hospitalization. If someone checks himself in for treatment, I don't think that should qualify as a firearms disability. My impression from reading a lot of very depressing news stories is that people who have been involuntarily committed as a danger to themselves or others are far more likely to become a news headline than those who check themselves into a hospital for treatment. It might be useful if the National Institute of Justice dug through commitment records, and did a longitudinal study to see how strong of a correlation there was between voluntary and involuntary commitment, and subsequent suicide or violent crimes. Right now, we're all operating a bit in the dark.
It is something licensed gun dealers worry about whenever a would-be customer walks through the door.
“We do our best to screen people, but I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m a gun dealer,” said Roger Owen, who owns Onrops Ammo & Guns in Independence.
Even the National Rifle Association supports laws keeping guns out of the hands of mentally defective people, a position that some mental-health advocates resist because they think it “criminalizes” mental illness.
That concerns the Professional Gun Retailers Association, which for years has pushed to increase the amount of mental-health information available when conducting required background checks for prospective gun purchases.
But the group’s president, Andrew Molchan, said the national trend in recent years is to make access to any kind of health record even more restrictive. Molchan called the current system of background checks “Catch-22 schizophrenic.”
Increasingly constrained by privacy laws, the system tries to balance the rights of millions of emotionally troubled Americans who aren’t a threat to society against the need to keep firearms away from someone who is.
...
On paper, the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 bans firearm possession and gun transfers to anyone who has been involuntary committed to a mental institution or “adjudicated as a mental defective” in court — at least for several years after successful treatment.
To help make that law work, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. The computerized system is used by federally licensed firearms dealers.
The NICS interfaces with two other systems that contain records from federal and state agencies to check criminal records and identify those who are not allowed to have guns, magazines or ammunition. Such people include convicted felons and veterans who have been dishonorably discharged.
But the prohibitions depend on record-keepers feeding data to the FBI. Only 22 states currently submit mental-health information to NICS’ Mental Defective File or its Denied Persons File, according to the FBI.
“Just like a lot of federal laws, they passed that without thinking about how it would work on the local level,” Kyle Smith of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation said of gun prohibitions for the mentally ill.
“And as a practical matter, most states keep mental petitions as confidential files. They are not sent into a simple database that can be checked,” Smith said.
Roughly 3 million Americans have been involuntarily committed to mental institutions, but the NICS database contains the names of fewer than 235,000.
‘Criminalizing’ effect
More than a dozen states in a 2004 Justice Department study attributed their inability to funnel mental-health records into NICS to “too few resources,” primitive databases or “limited time.”
But some mental-health advocacy groups also have played a role by resisting legislative efforts to put teeth into gun laws.
Requiring courts to relay mental-health information to authorities “criminalizes mental illness,” said Sheila Osborn of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Greater Kansas City. “I would say that’s probably the most stigmatizing thing that could happen to someone.
“… When you’re going as far as wanting to single out individuals who have a chronic biological mental illness and not single out individuals who have an anger-management problem or any type of high-risk problem, that’s just plain ridiculous,” Osborn said.
...
Legislative efforts to direct more mental-health records into the NICS database “imply that all people who have acute-care needs related to a mental illness are dangerous,” Kirk Lowry of the Disability Rights Center of Kansas said at a legislative hearing last year.
Such measures also could result in fewer Americans seeking treatment for mental illness for fear of their records reaching national databases, said Allen Rostron, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who formerly worked for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
So, How Are The Wife and Environmental Misdemeanors?
I haven't figured out if I am amused or outraged by this:HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.
Another environmentalist wants to reduce the population of the planet to less than one billion people:
The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.
John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.
"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."
In his latest comments, the academic says that when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences.Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth.
Go read the original article by Watson here, and you can see the utter contempt that he has for our species--the only species that he does have contempt for:
Watson’s May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion.
The commentary reminded readers that Watson had called humans a disease before and he wasn’t sorry. “I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.’ I make no apologies for that statement,” the column continued.Evolution addresses the diminishment of biological diversity through speciation, but it takes at least ten million years to build up diversity of species to the level prior to a mass extinction event.
Oh, and it gets better:
The world ten million years after the Jurassic crash was radically different than the world of the dinosaurs. The world after the Holocene extinction event, the one we are in now, will be as radically altered and most likely one of the species that will not survive the event will be the present dominant species – the human species.
In a way, the Holocenic extinction event could also be called the “Holocenic hominid collective suicide event.”
After all, we Homo sapiens are the last survivors of the hominid line, a group that has been on its way out for some time. The beetle family, for example, has some 700,000 species by comparison. Odds are many of the beetle species will survive the event, whereas we will not.
But the reality is that what is happening now is the result of the collective actions of us hominids. We are the ruthlessly territorial primates whose numbers have soared far beyond the level of global carrying capacity for the deadly behavioural characteristics that we display.We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels.
For the life of me, I can't imagine why he's willing to tolerate such advanced technologies as blimps and sailing ships. Those sailing ships made possible the destruction of the dodo and many other flightless birds!
Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.
All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.
Preferably vegan and vegetarian diets can be adopted. We need to eliminate herds of ungulates like cows and sheep and replace them with wild ungulates like bison and caribou and allow those species to fulfill the proper roles in nature. We need to restore the prey predator relationship and bring back the wolf and the bear. We need the large predators and ungulates, not as food, but as custodians of the land that absorbs the carbon dioxide and produces the oxygen. We need to live with them in mutual respect.
We need to remove and destroy all fences and barriers that bar wildlife from moving freely across the land. We need to lower populations of domestic housecats and dogs. Already the world’s housecats consume more fish than all the world’s seals and we have made the cow into the largest aquatic predator on the planet because more than one half of all fish taken from the sea is converted into meal for animal feed.
We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.
We can retain technology but within the context of Henry David Thoreau’s simple message to “simplify, simplify, simplify.”
We need an economic system that provides all people with educational, medical, security, and support systems without mass production and vast utilization of resources. This will only work within the context of a much smaller global population.
Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.
Now, I have written in the past about the advantages and disadvantages that might accrue to the survivors if we made a conscious decision to reduce our population. One advantage would be reduced prices for resources. To the extent that the price of goods dropped, that would be good. Another advantage would be reduced pollution and thus less need for pollution controls. If the population of the U.S. were 30 million people, scattered over the same area and in the same pattern as the 300 million that are now here, we wouldn't need pollution controls on cars, and perhaps not on factories.
The disadvantage is: less brains working on creative and clever new ideas to make life better. Of course, with the advantages above, perhaps we wouldn't need as many people figuring how what needed to be done.
But regardless: such a shrinking of mankind wouldn't be even. We can say with some certainty that trying to reduce the population of the Earth to one billion people would be done by the West (which is already committing cultural suicide because of the morally superior example of the crowd that beheads living, conscious people). A world of one billion people would all be Muslim.
Sore Losers
It is astonishing what sore losers the left are. When they lost the presidential election in 2000 and in 2004--the whining and screeching were beyond belief. When Republicans lost control of Congress last year, instead of dark mutterings about conspiracies by Diebold, or raising the very real issue of election fraud (which is actually the norm in some cities), they sat back and evaluated in what way we had failed: the personal corruption of members of Congress who would couldn't keep from making lewd suggestions to pages, or who solicited bribes.
Of course, the left just lost in France, and rather than ask themselves why, they responded with riots:Street violence took some of the shine off victory in the French elections for new president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Far-left activists had running battles with police across France as 270 people were taken in for questioning and 367 parked vehicles were torched.
The System is Broken: Fix It!
More about Cho Seung-Hui from AP:WASHINGTON (AP) - The gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech failed to get the mental health treatment ordered by a judge who declared him an imminent threat to himself and others, a newspaper reported Monday.
And if the Virginia legislature can't or won't fix it, they better identify why.
Seung-Hui Cho was found "mentally ill and in need of hospitalization" in December 2005, according to court papers. A judge ordered him into involuntary outpatient treatment.
However, neither the court nor community mental health officials followed up on the judge's order, and Cho didn't get the treatment, The Washington Post reported, citing unnamed authorities who have seen Cho's medical files.
Federal, state and local law enforcement and local mental health officials contacted Monday by The Associated Press would not confirm the story. School officials did not immediately return multiple calls seeking comment.
"The system doesn't work well," said Tom Diggs, executive director of the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which has been studying the state mental health system and will report to the General Assembly next year.
Things Taken by Tornado
This is actually a pretty astonishing item for a tornado to carry away--part of another world. From KWCH.COM, channel 12 Kansas:The tornado that razed the Kansas town of Greensburg also snatched one of its most valuable treasures. The thousand-pound Brenham pallasite meteorite is gone.
Greensburg has drawn world-class meteorite hunters for decades to this remote Kansas hamlet. Trooper Ronald Knoefel says even the town's own extensive meteorite collection is gone.
Welcome To Idaho
This is going to an irregular series of postings about things that I see or find that make Idaho different from living on the coasts--and maybe even other states in the heartland. Not that I am completely happy with every thing that shows up in this category, but they are aspects of live here that may be a little surprising if you live in Los Angeles or New York City.
On the way back from Banks (where we ate in the Banks Cafe--a much better lunch than I would have expected for the price and location, overlooking the Payette River), we stopped at Ponderosa Sports. The guy that runs it took the Voluntary Separation Incentive from HP some years ago, and now runs this combination gun store/sporting goods/gift shop with his wife.
This is his truck parked out front. The only question is: tailgater discouragement, or extra propulsion unit?
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And yes, that appears to a Barrett Light .50.
Lack of Blogging
The last batch of ScopeRoller 11 Deluxe sets--the batch that I found myself wondering, "How long will it take to sell these?" was exhausted, and an order came in, so I started making another batch of five sets. This is slower than it ought to be, because I can't seem to find 2 3/8" UHMW or Delrin rod anymore. Turning 2.5" UHMW down to 2.35" is a remarkably slow process on this lathe.
And I'm just about out of the 5" casters, too--another one of those items that I bought in quantity to save money, and wondered if I would ever run out.
Then, my wife and I went for a drive into the wilderness northwest of Horseshoe Bend--and ended up in a forest with snow on the road. Coming down out of the mountains on something called the Banks Grade (because it descends to the tiny town of Banks). It was aptly named--very steep. Here's a picture looking down from the road to the Payette River. This would have been scary to drive in the dark, or in a heavy rainstorm.
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This sign on county road 643 just as we entered Boise County for some reason struck me as amusing--almost a self-refuting claim:
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UPDATE: And two more ScopeRoller orders came in this afternoon. This is pretty good, since I haven't done any advertising in many weeks.
