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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).



Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through.

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Saturday, May 19, 2007
 
More Signs of the Vigorous Racism of the Mainstream Media

I had heard about this case a couple of years ago, floating around the blogosphere, but of course, it received no mainstream media attention. Read the description of this case, and ask yourself: if victims had been black, and the rapists/torturers/murderers had been white, do you think you would have heard for weeks on end about the Wichita Massacre?
The Carr brothers, 22-year-old Reginald and 20-year-old Jonathan, already had serious criminal records when they began their spree. On December 8, 2000, having recently arrived in Wichita, they committed armed robbery against 23-year-old assistant baseball coach Andrew Schreiber. Three days later, they shot and mortally wounded 55-year-old cellist and librarian Ann Walenta as she tried to escape from them in her car.

Their crime spree culminated on December 14, when they invaded a home and subjected five young men and women to robbery, sexual abuse, and murder. The brothers broke into a house chosen nearly at random where Brad Heyka, Heather Muller, Aaron Sander, Jason Befort and a young woman identified as "H.G.", all in their twenties, were spending the night. Initially scouring the house for valuables, they forced their hostages to strip naked, bound and detained them, and subjected them to various forms of sexual humiliation, including rape and sodomy. They also forced the men to engage in sexual acts with the women, and the women with each other. They then drove the victims to ATMs to empty their bank accounts, before finally bringing them to a snowy deserted football field and shooting them execution-style in the backs of their heads, leaving them for dead. The Carr brothers then drove Befort's truck over the bodies.

They returned to the house to ransack it for more valuables. It was then they claimed their final victim, Nikki, H.G.'s muzzled dog who was beaten and stabbed to death.

Only H.G. survived (thanks to her metal hairpin having deflected the bullet), after running naked for more than a mile in freezing weather to report the attack and seek medical attention. In a much-remarked point of tragedy, she had seen her boyfriend Befort shot, after having learned of his intention to propose marriage when the Carrs, by chance, discovered the engagement ring hidden in a can of coffee beans.

The Carr brothers, who took few precautions, were captured by the police the next day, and Reginald was identified by Schreiber and the dying Walenta. Law enforcement officials ultimately decided that the Carrs' motive was robbery, despite the other aspects of the crime.
At trial, the Carrs' attorney argued that they had tough childhoods. Apparently, not tough enough to kill them, and not tough enough to put even a tiny bit of empathy with the suffering of others.

The national news media in America serve no useful function. They make no serious effort to portray the complexity of questions such as global warming; focus on sensational crimes of relatively little importance--unless the killers are black, in which case the crimes are generally ignored or excused.

If they covered no sensational crimes of little national importance only at a very low level--for example, giving coverage on the day the Duke rape case was first reported, and perhaps coverage when the case was dropped--it would not much matter if they were selective about reporting black on white crime. But to spend the time covering the Duke case--an allegation of rape--while ignoring the Wichita Massacre and these horrifying murders in Knoxville--well, just imagine if the national news media reported in lurid detail, for days on end, every rape committed by a black man against a white woman, and ignored all other rapes. You would correctly recognize that the objective was to demonize black men and foment lynching.

There's a quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson which sounds just a bit too modern to me:
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
I rather doubt that the quote is accurate, but if it is, Jefferson must have said it before the "flowering" of partisan newspapers in the early Republic. (Flowers grow well in manure, and a lot of the early Republic's newspapers aren't even as polite as manure.) I'm afraid that this other quote attributed to Jefferson--which may also be incorrect--is more accurate:
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
UPDATE: To my surprise, both quotes are accurate. See here. The first quote is from 1787, and the second from 1807. A lot of experience in that period with a free press seems to have lowered his estimation of them.

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Fun With Vertical Mills

I've never had terribly good luck with this Sherline vertical mill--and I wasn't sure if it was because I bought it used--and perhaps used up. The problem has always been that I couldn't get the mill vise to hold parts firmly enough. As soon as I tried to run an end mill or a flycutter over a part, it would eventually shake loose.

I finally reached the end of my frustration, and began to wonder if there was something worn out about this mill vise, so I contacted the president of Sherline (who responded on his private email--on a Saturday!) and he confirmed that what I was doing should work, and made some suggestions. (One of which, politely stated, was to read the manual for the mill vise.)

Well, it turns out that the socket head screw that tightens down the mill vise is no longer a particularly good hexagon inside--it is definitely a bit rounded. I tried to find a replacement 1 5/8" long, 10-32 socket head screw at Lowe's and at Home Depot on my way back from the Idaho Military History Museum--no luck. They had nothing in 10-32. The leap is always from 8-32 to 10-24.

So I ran down to Horseshoe's Hardware. Horseshoe's Hardware is one of the more surprising retail operations. It is one of the smallest square footage hardware stores that I have ever seen--and yet it is surprisingly well stocked. Things like metric dies. I called easily a dozen stores trying to find metric dies in Boise a year or two ago, without success. I would never have guessed Horseshoe's Hardware would have such things. (The owner is also a surprisingly interesting person--former social worker, and as you might expect, pretty well read.)

While Horseshoe's Hardware didn't have exactly what I needed, they did have a 2" 10-32 thumbscrew, which worked well enough for me use it in the mill vise--and my, what a difference! I can now exert enough force for the mill vise to hold 1/4" aluminum or Delrin plate tightly enough for me to take actually quite aggressive cuts.

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Prosecution for False Claims

Glad to see that the mainstream media are prepared to admit that one of their darlings wasn't what he claimed:
SEATTLE - A man who tried to position himself as a leader of the anti-war movement by claiming to have participated in war crimes while serving in Iraq is facing federal charges of falsifying his record.

Jesse Adam Macbeth, 23, formerly of Phoenix, garnered attention on blogs and in some alternative media after he began claiming in 2005 to have been awarded a Purple Heart for his service, which he said included slaughtering innocents in a Fallujah mosque. His story was contradicted by his discharge form, showing that he was kicked out of the Army after six weeks at Fort Benning, Ga., in 2003 because of his “entry level performance and conduct.”

A complaint unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court in Seattle charged him with one count of using or possessing a forged or altered military discharge certificate, and one count of making false statements in seeking benefits from the Veterans Administration.

Macbeth’s public defender, Jay Stansell, declined to comment.

Anti-war groups used his claims


Organizations that opposed the war, including Iraq Veterans Against the War, posted videos or statements containing Macbeth’s claims on their Web sites. In one videotaped interview, a skinny, stuttering Macbeth, dressed in a camouflage jacket, described slaughtering hundreds of people in a mosque: “We would burn their bodies ... hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque,” he said.

Iraq Veterans Against the War and other organizations removed the claims after learning they were false.
So not only were the war atrocities claims false--so was his service in Iraq. Complete fraud.


Friday, May 18, 2007
 
What You Can Do About The Illegal Amnesty Bill

Well, I mean a bill to amnesty illegal aliens, but this bill is so bad, it should be illegal. From a group called GrassFire.org:

#1-- Help us flood the Senate with faxes.

Stopping amnesty will be a numbers game. We must have 41 votes
to stop amnesty in the Senate. We have identified a list of Key
Senators that can stop amnesty. Our system will send your fax to
every one of those Senators right now (or, choose to fax every
Senator). Go here:

If you want to send your own faxes, we have posted all the
fax numbers on the site as well. Either way -- please send faxes!

#2 -- Make phone calls today!

call these key Senators:

Majority Leader Harry Reid: 202-224-5556
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: 202-224-3135
Sen. Arlen Specter: 202-224-4254
Sen. Mel Martinez: 202-224-3041
Sen. Lindsay Graham: 202-224-5972
Sen. John McCain: 202-224-2235
Minority Whip Trent Lott: 202-224-2708

Tell them you oppose any bill that gives amnesty to illegals,
including the new "compromise" bill!

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Carbon Fiber Composite

I've been looking at aluminum square tubing for Big Bertha's rebuild--but I'm running into some interesting issues. I would prefer to use two square tubes on opposite sides of the optical components, primarily because it makes it easier to mount it in a Dobsonian mounting as a short term strategy.

There's also a cost issue. One 4" square tube (which is as light as I can go if I only use one tube) gives a deflection of .00053", which I consider sufficient for my purposes. But that one 4" tube is substantially more expensive than two 3" tubes would be--and the two 3" tubes gives a deflection of .00068", assuming that the stiffness is additive.

I'm told by a PhD in Mechanical Engineering that using two tubes on opposite sides of the optical components, as long as everything is firmly attached at both ends, will give a stiffness that is quite a bit more than the sum of each tube, because you are effectively creating an I-beam. But how much stiffer than the sum of two tubes is that? I'm not sure.

Anyway, I'm looking at carbon fiber composite. I see figures for its modulus of elasticity quoted of 33 million pounds per square inch, or about 220 gigapascals--more than three times stiffer than aluminum or steel. At the same time, it is far lighter than aluminum. Unfortunately, while there are a lot of vendors of carbon fiber composite tubes, all that I am finding seem to be aimed at the bicycle enthusiast, so no square tubes, and finding one that is 72" is also difficult. (Perhaps I should check with whoever makes racing bicycles for the Jolly Green Giant.) Any suggestions on where I might find 2" square tubing made of this miraculous material?

UPDATE: It turns out that the formula for computing the stiffness of an I-beam is described here. You compute the moment of inertia based on the cross-section of the flanges (the top and bottom horizontal strokes of the "I"), a factor that includes the height of the vertical member (and that gets squared), and a third factor that multiples the width of the bottom flange by the height of the vertical member--and then raises it to the third power. If I regard the two aluminum hexagons that will sit between the tubes as effectively a very tall, very wide vertical member, then the combination will be very stiff indeed. Unlike a conventional I-beam, the two hexagonal members are many times wider and taller than the flanges (although not full length). Best of all, because they are effectively round, unlike an I-beam, which is much stiffer vertically than horizontally (because of that cubed factor on the height of the vertical member), there should not be an enormous difference in stiffness of the telescope depending on whether the tubes are vertical or horizontal.

I haven't tried to calculate the deflection of the combination, but I suspect that having these hexagonal structures between will enhance stiffness quite impressively. It also argues for going a little stiffer on the hexagons, so that I can go a bit thinner on the tubes.

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You Know the Joke About a Conservative Is a Liberal Who Has Been Mugged?

As with many jokes and stereotypes, there's a little kernel of truth hiding in there. Consider this recent news story about an Ohio legislator who opposed adoption of the shall-issue concealed handgun license law--and got mugged by reality, as this article from the May 15, 2007 Cleveland Plain Dealer explains:
It's funny how a gun can instantly change your perspec tive on things, make you wish you could rewrite history.

State Rep. Michael DeBose, a southside Cleveland Democrat, discovered this lesson the night of May 1, when he thought he was going to die. That's the night he wished he had that gun vote back.

DeBose, who had just returned from Columbus, where he had spent the day in committee hearings, decided to take a short walk up Holly Hill, the street where he has lived with his wife for the past 27 years.

It was late, but DeBose, 51, was restless. The ordained Baptist minister knew his Lee-Harvard neighborhood was changing, but he wasn't scared. The idle, young men who sometimes hang out on his and adjacent streets didn't threaten him.

He is a big man and, besides, he had run the same streets before he found Jesus - and a wife. That night, he just needed a walk.

The loud muffler on a car that slowly passed as he was finishing the walk caught his attention, though. When the car stopped directly in front of his house - three houses from where he stood - he knew there was going to be a problem.

"There was a tall one and a short one," DeBose said, sipping on a McDonald's milkshake and recounting the experience Friday.

"The tall one reached in his pocket and pulled out a silver gun. And they both started running towards me."

"At first I just backed up, but then I turned around and started running and screaming."

"When I started running, the short boy stopped chasing and went back to the car. But the tall boy with the gun kept following me. I ran to the corner house and started banging on Mrs. Jones' door."

...

The loud muffler sped off, and DeBose started rethinking his gun vote.

DeBose twice voted against a measure to allow Ohioans to carry concealed weapons. It became law in 2004.

DeBose voted his conscience. He feared that CCW permits would lead to a massive influx of new guns in the streets and a jump in gun violence. He feared that Cleveland would become the O.K. Corral, patrolled by legions of freshly minted permit holders.

"I was wrong," he said Friday.

"I'm going to get a permit and so is my wife.

"I've changed my mind. You need a way to protect yourself and your family.

"I don't want to hurt anyone. But I never again want to be in the position where I'm approached by someone with a gun and I don't have one."

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More Evidence That Senator Craig Is Turning Into a Closet Democrat

My wife and I were concerned that Craig apparently was buying the Anthropogenic Global Warming arguments, and wrote him a letter about it--emphasizing that the science is this is still up in the air concerning how much if any is the result of man's actions. The response we received is something that a Democrat--a moderate Democrat, of course--might write:
I have always felt that energy security, our competitiveness as a nation, and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand. At this point in time there are a majority of Senators, including myself, who agree that the globe is warming and that reducing greenhouse gasses is a prudent course of action.

What the majority of Senators do not agree on is the path forward that will curb the amount of greenhouse gases that we produce without jeopardizing our quality of life. I am one who has spent more time than most over the past decade trying to understand the science as well as the policy of climate change. I believe that prudent actions need not be punitive actions. I have continually supported incentives to bring new cleaner technologies to market, while also incentivizing existing clean energy technologies such as hydropower, nuclear energy, efficiency improvements, clean coal, and all forms of renewable power.

I have also been a staunch opponent of regulations that seek to cap our economy and disadvantage this country globally. This has been the clearest lesson of Kyoto: other countries are not going to turn their lights out and stop growing - and neither will we. I believe that priorities should continue to be to re-license our existing hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, and at the same time we need to look to the future and provide incentives for the next generation of nuclear plants and bio-fuel technologies such as cellulosic ethanol.

The United States is not standing idly by in the climate change debate; on the contrary, we lead the world in dollars spent on research and on clean technology development. The United States has committed billions of dollars to mobilize the science and technology community to enhance research and development efforts that will better inform climate change policy decisions. Indeed, the Bush Administration has initiated a Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has reviewed and endorsed. Moreover, the United States is engaged in extensive international efforts on climate change, both through multilateral and bilateral activities. The United States provides $5.9 billion for activities under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was the largest contribution of any member nation in 2006.

For too long the climate change debate has been fixated on assigning blame instead of looking at real solutions. I remain committed to providing real solutions for making our nation's energy supply more secure, more competitive, and cleaner than it has ever been before. Again, thank you for contacting me with your thoughts on climate change. If there is anything further I can do for you in the future please do not hesitate to contact me.
In short, Senator Craig won't admit that there's some very serious questions about the accuracy of these AGW claims, and just wants to make sure that the damage that gets done to us won't be too severe.

What is it about spending time in the District of Criminals that does this to our elected representatives?

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H-1B Visas

The Center for Immigration Studies (which is not pro-immigration) has a study out of H1B visas here. I don't have enough expertise to tell if these claims they are making are accurate or not:
Technology sector employers, who represent the largest share of H-1B visa users, tell the public that the H-1B program is vital to their ability to find the highly skilled workers they need. Yet Department of Labor data tell a different story. Previous studies have found that the H-1B program is primarily used to import low-wage workers.1 This report examines the most recently available wage data on the H-1B program and finds that the trend of low prevailing wage claims and low wages continues. In addition, while industry spokesmen say these workers bring needed skills to our economy, on the H-1B Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) filed with the Department of Labor, employers classify most of their H-1B workers as being relatively low-skilled for the jobs they are filling. This report compares prevailing wage claims and wages employers reported for H-1B workers in computer programming occupations in FY 2005 to wages for U.S. workers in the same occupation. Although the H-1B program stipulates that employers must pay H-1B workers at least the prevailing wage for their occupation and location, the results of this report clearly demonstrate that the regulation does not produce that result. The findings in this report clearly demonstrate that the legal definition of the prevailing wage requirement does not ensure H-1B workers are paid the actual market prevailing wage. Employer prevailing wage claims and reported wages for H-1B workers are significantly less than those for U.S. workers in the same occupation and location. This suggests that, regardless of the program’s original intent, the H-1B program now operates mainly to supply U.S. employers with cheap workers, rather than with essential skilled workers.
Unlike the illegal aliens who drive down the wages of unskilled or low skilled citizens and legal residents, H-1B workers are driving down the wages of people like myself, who are paid pretty darn well. I'm not asking you to cry for people whose salaries are driven down to $80,000 a year by competition--it's not equivalent to the guy who is trying to raise a family on minimum wage.

Still, there are some unpleasant results, if this is an accurate description of the people that are brought in under H-1B visas. It means that most of these jobs are positions that could be filled by college grads, or people with one or two years of experience. (My experience with my current employer suggests that this is actually the case--some of them bring no more--and in some cases less expertise than I would expect of any recent computer science graduate.) Driving down wages in this entry level or near entry level segment has the effect of discouraging Americans from getting degrees in these fields--or preventing them from getting jobs that will give them the experience that they need. This is bad for them, and probably bad for the American economy in general. We already have a hard enough time getting Americans to major in hard subjects--why provide any encouragement for them to get degrees in fields where, to put it bluntly, we already have more than we usefully employ?

UPDATE: A reader writes:
I am a software engineer that has worked in Silicon Valley and now in the DC area. As far as I'm concerned, the H1B program is a complete sham. During the early days of the web explosion, I worked at Netscape and we hired H1B visa workers like crazy. At that time an H1B worker couldn't switch jobs, which we referred to as "H1B handcuffs". The gov kept ramping up the H1B cap at the behest of business lobbyists. Each time, the cap was met almost immediately. Many of these engineers returned to their country of origins when their visas expired, the majority of whom where Indian. That led to a strong buildup of experienced engineers in India which was followed by pushes to "offshore" development. In other words, we trained our own competition. This meant a double impact on the US software engineering market, first from the pressure of H1B workers, then from efforts to shift the work offshore. The number of US students seeking software engineering degrees dropped as a result. The current H1B program no longer restricts workers to their original sponsors, giving them more leverage in the work market. However, there is still heavy downward pressure on US salaries.

Also, one of the regs for H1B is that the company must be unable to fill the job with a US worker. Some more clever companies satisfied this requirement by simply advertising the job in a different city then the actual job location, thus nearly insuring that no one would respond.

I don't blame the Indian engineers for taking advantage of the program. Overwhelmingly the Indian engineers I've worked with were smart and capable. They acted in their own interests as one would expect. But that is the point. Every time I hear someone explaining how great it will be if we just expand the H1B program again, I think to myself: "This is not in my best interest, and in my opinion, not in the best interest of the rest of US workers." I just read comments by Larry Kudlow on "NRO The Corner" singing the praises of an expanded H1B program. I'm not buying it.

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Senator Craig (R-ID) Joins the Democrats

Why bother voting for Republicans, when they act like Democrats? You can see Senator Craig's support for this insane immigration proposal here. My wife and I just sent him this letter:

To say that we are disappointed that you are backing this immigration amnesty (and that is what it is) barely touches the surface. Why bother to obey laws if you will be rewarded later for breaking them? I can understand why Democrats want this--so that they can bring in vast populations who speak little English, and can therefore be persuaded to vote without a full understanding of the issues--but why are helping them?

Cheap labor may be good for businesses, but the costs of that cheap labor, for medical care, and in the criminal justice system, gets stuck on all of us in higher taxes. It also puts large numbers of unskilled and low skilled American citizens and LEGAL residents at an enormous economic disadvantage, as the flood of cheap labor drives down wages. This is tremendously destructive to our society, because it discourages the bottom of our society from work. What are you thinking?

Low wages also discourage the mechanization of the low skilled jobs. In the 19th century, the U.S. led the world in inventing devices such as the sewing machine and the harvester because we were short on labor. There's no incentive to invent robotic vegetable harvesters when cheap labor is so easy to get.

Finally, there's the national security question. At least of the suspects in the Fort Dix plot were illegal aliens, and groups such as MS-13 benefit from being able to hide in the sea of illegal aliens. Why make this easier?

The Republican National Committee hasn't received a penny from me for two years because of their insistence on encouraging illegal immigration. Why vote Republican when Republicans act like Democrats?
I am beginning to wonder: should some real Republicans (not the pretend kind, like Senator Craig seems to be turning into) run in the primaries next year?

UPDATE: Coincidentally, I received a fundraising letter from the Republican National Committee today. I usually just ignore these now--but today I wrote, "No money for amnesty" on the letter, stuffed all of the paperwork back in the Business Reply Envelope, and sent it back. What I should have written is, "No money for the RNC until conservatives control it again."

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Justifications of Hate Crime Laws

David Kopel over at Volokh Conspiracy points out that one of the justifications for why hate crimes (crimes motivated by bias against members of an identifiable group) is the secondary consequences:
The best argument for hate crimes laws is that a hate crime causes more harm than an ordinary crime, because it causes many other people to fear being victimized. This is true for some hate crimes (e.g., public vandalism of a synagogue), but certainly not all of them (e.g., a dispute between neighbors in which an epithet is used). Moreover, there are plenty of ordinary crimes (such as highly-publicized serial attacks on random victims), which also cause fear in many people besides the immediate victims.
And this is one of the most powerful arguments against "hate crime" laws. Yes, a crime motivated by hatred of members of group A will, if widely publicized, cause all members of group A to feel threatened. But a robbery and murder that is motivated only by the desire to obtain the contents of the victim's wallet causes all members of the society to feel threatened. (At least, all members of the society that have anything worth taking.) So why doesn't the same logic apply to robbery, aggravated assault, or murder? All violent crimes that aren't motivated by bias produce a generalized fear in the population.

Let's just stop the pretending: this is about pandering to a group that is politically powerful, and wants violent crimes against it to be punished very severely--but doesn't much care about violent crimes committed against everyone else.

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Thursday, May 17, 2007
 
This Is Wrong

Like bad science fiction--except that brutal monsters of the past actually tried this, but didn't have any chance of success. The British government has just approved a new "research" technique:
The government has overturned its proposed ban on the creation of human-animal embryos and now wants to allow them to be used to develop new treatments for incurable diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The proposal, in a new draft fertility bill published today, would allow scientists to create three different types of hybrid embryos.

Scientists would be allowed to grow the embryos in a lab for no more than two weeks, and it would be illegal to implant them in a human.

The first kind of hybrid allowed under the bill, known as a chimeric embryo, is made by injecting cells from an animal into a human embryo. The second, known as a human transgenic embryo, involves injecting animal DNA into a human embryo.

The third, known as a cytoplasmic hybrid, is created by transferring the nuclei of human cells, such as skin cells, into animal eggs from which almost all the genetic material has been removed.

This is this type of human-animal embryo that is being developed in British universities. Scientists say that developing these embryos will provide a plentiful source of stem cells - immature cells that can develop into many different types of tissue - for use in medical research.

The move is a U-turn on proposals to outlaw all types of human-animal embryos set out by ministers in a white paper published last December.

But the new proposal would not allow the creation of "true hybrid" embryos, which would involve fertilising a human egg with animal sperm or vice versa.
I've mentioned in the past that the Soviet Union attempted--unsuccessfully--to crossbreed humans and chimpanzees to make "living war machines." I mentioned a while back this scientist who wants to create mice with human brains. And this also horrifying account of "experiments."

I am not hostile to science. I originally majored in chemistry, long, long ago at USC. But there comes a point where you have a draw a line and say, "This is horrifying, this is wrong, and it should not be done."

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Why Obey Laws?

It's not like there's any punishment when you break the law:
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a striking reach across party lines, the White House and key lawmakers agreed Thursday on a sweeping immigration plan to grant legal status to millions of people in the country unlawfully.

Sealed after months of secretive bargaining, the deal mandates bolstered border security and a high-tech employment verification system to prevent illegal workers from getting jobs.

President Bush said the proposal would "help enforce our borders but equally importantly, it'll treat people with respect."

The compromise brought together an unlikely alliance of liberal Democrats such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and conservative Republicans such as Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona on an issue that carries heavy potential risks and rewards for all involved.
Great. Republicans who sold out to Big Business interests have made common cause with Democrats who are only thinking of the next generation of guaranteed Democrats (or so they assume). This is going to be a flaming disaster. The Republican National Committee hasn't received a penny from me in a bit more than two years because the national party was so intent on this. They want to believe that somehow, this is going to get Hispanics to vote Republican. Well, it might. But I'm not much interested in voting for a party that is now acting like Democrats--more interested in winning the next election than in national security.

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How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended

It's here. It would have been a bit shorter of a film, however. Thanks to Michael Williams for the pointer.

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The Big Bertha Rebuild Project

I mentioned this yesterday
, and I know that some of you are very interested in it (or are really desperate for something to read). For those who are wondering why I care about a deflection measured in hundredths of inch, when I almost certainly can't make all the parts that accurately--it's very simple. With the telescope sticking straight up in the air, there will be no deflection. With the telescope pointing at the horizon, a few hundredths of an inch of deflection will screw up the collimation of the optical train. If I collimate for one position, that much deflection will screw up collimation in the other position. As far as I am concerned, deflection needs to be down in the thousandths of an inch area before I am happy.

I went to Metals Supermarket today to look at what they had in stock, and see if comparing the stiffness of the square aluminum tubing with what the formulas tell me passed the giggle test. Yup! I tried to bend a 3", .125" wall piece of 6063T6 aluminum, and a 3", .25" wall piece of 6061T6 aluminum. Yes, extremely stiff!

There's no difference in stiffness between 6061 and 6063--although 6061 is a bit harder. Both have a 68.9 gigapascal modulus of elasticity.

The good news is that when I went out to measure the dimensions of Big Bertha, I discovered that some of my assumptions about the dimensions were wrong. The mirror weighs 26 pounds, and it is only 23 inches from the balance point for the telescope. This lower weight and shorter length substantially reduces the point load length and somewhat reduces the beam load length. This lets me use either a somewhat smaller tube, or get less deflection. Using real data, a 3" square tube with .125" wall would give me .001" total deflection from beam load and point weight load--and at least at this point, it appears that my total telescope weight will be somewhere around 46 pounds.

I can get the total deflection below .001" by going to a 4.25" tube, which brings the telescope weight up to 48 pounds--still acceptable. I am still trying to find out if using two smaller tubes is additive--if it distributes the load across both tubes, and thus cuts the deflection in half. I have an email into a friend with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering--I'm hoping that he is educated enough to answer the question!

As I mentioned, I have to build my own mirror cell to fit the rather odd geometry of not having a tube, but I think have come up with a design involving a hexagon that will work. I can't turn a piece of aluminum 17.5" inside diameter (as tempting as it is), but I think the solution is to make a hexagon from pieces of aluminum bar stock, cutting 60 degree corners, then drill, tap, and screw them together at the corners. I can use a similar, although slightly larger hexagon to suspend the diagonal mirror from, and on which to mount the eyepiece focuser and finder.

I may build a small version of this first to house the 3" f/4.5 reflector I built some years ago--a chance to verify the design in Delrin. If it works in Delrin, aluminum should be no problem. Yes, the weight of something like this goes up with the cube of the increase in linear dimension, but aluminum has a somewhat higher modulus of elasticity than Delrin, so I suspect that if it works for the 3", I won't have to do much to make it work for Big Bertha.

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Barbarism...Let's Have a Party

I mentioned yesterday Michelle Malkin's report
about this act of barbarism--the rape, torture, murder, and mutilation of a couple of young people that wandered into the wrong neighborhood in Knoxville. It gets worse. This report concerns two of the accused:

(Knoxville) - St. Nicolas Thief, president and founder of Black Poverty Speaks, along with many local Knoxville blacks who live in the Washington Pike area has organized a social action protest celebration championing Lemaricus Davidson and Letalvis Cobbins.

Davidson and Cobbins are the brothers and two of the five suspects charged in the carjacking, kidnapping, rape and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

"We're coordinating the celebration to to jive with the march angry whites are planning in memory of the victims and because of the 'media black-out' they note the case is receiving from national news networks," Thief, who is currently stationed in Knoxville, said.

"We're celebrating underprivileged Knoxville blacks who victimize privileged Knoxville whites," he added.

"If you come down here, you're either visiting someone or you're buying drugs," said, Misty Boshears, 31, who lives near Washington Pike. "I'm shocked, but I'm not shocked," of Christian and Newsom's murders, Boshears said. "I don't allow my girl to play outside because of the danger."

Another neighbor, Carl Hunley, who lives next door to the house where Christian's body was found, said three weeks prior to Christian's body being discovered, there was a drive-by shooting at the house.

"These are the kinds of communities we live in all throughout this country," St. Nicolas Thief said. "These communities are the legacies of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.

"That whites' ancestors and the government hasn't and doesn't educate whites on how the legacy of slavery has created the impoverished conditions that do continue to influence and trap our people doesn't mean we have to excuse their ignorance.

"There's going to be a party in Knoxville and America everytime black poverty speaks and privileged whites suffer."
Fortunately, not everyone in Knoxville is looking to make excuses. Some are learning the lesson:
Interest in self-defense has boosted inquiries about handgun carry permits in Knoxville, firearms instructors say, although Virginia Tech wasn't the main impetus.

"The carjacking really kicked it off," said Sgt. Mike Lett of the Knox County Sheriff's Office, referring to the January torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Lett teaches the required course for handgun carry applicants at the sheriff's training facility.


UPDATE: There are some who suspect that this "St. Nicolas Thief" may not exist, and this be an agent provocateur of traditional white racists. Classical Values discusses this at the bottom, here.

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This Sounds Like Martial Law

If a Republican suggested something like this, it would be a big news story. But because liberal Democrats want it to happen--and on top of the raging success of Maryland's gun control laws--you won't hear about it:

BALTIMORE - A city council leader, alarmed by Baltimore's rising homicide rate, wants to give the mayor the power to put troubled neighborhoods under virtual lockdown.

"Desperate measures are needed when we're in desperate situations," City Council Vice President Robert W. Curran told The (Baltimore) Sun. He said he would introduce the legislation next week.

Under Curran's plan, the mayor could declare "public safety act zones," which would allow police to close liquor stores and bars, limit the number of people on city sidewalks, and halt traffic during two-week intervals.

Police would be encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk individuals in those zones to search for weapons and drugs.

Baltimore has tallied 108 homicides already this year, compared to 98 over the same period last year. Police and prosecutors also say they are facing a "stop snitching" culture that discourages victims and witnesses from cooperating with investigators trying to get criminals off the streets.

Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., a mayoral hopeful, said Curran's idea was an interesting concept but it raised questions about civil liberties.

"We have to make sure we're not declaring martial law," he said.

How, exactly, would you tell the difference?

Mayor Sheila Dixon had a lukewarm response after meeting with Curran on Wednesday, but she said she might support the idea with some changes.

"We're already currently in those communities. We're bringing the resources and services to the communities," Dixon said. "I want him to build on what we're attempting to do."

Curran said he modeled his plan after an approach advocated by Philadelphia mayoral candidate Michael Nutter, who won the Democratic nomination Tuesday. Nutter has called for declarations of a "state of emergency" in high-crime neighborhoods, where police would conduct aggressive stop-and-frisk searches and impose curfews.

Nutter...my, there's an appropriate name.

Curran, who also sponsored Baltimore's recently passed smoking ban, said he expects opposition.

"Some of the critics of the smoking ban were telling me, 'If you want to save lives in Baltimore, do something about the murder rate, do something about the gun violence,'" he said. "I'm trying to stop the murders, to reduce the mortality rate from gun violence in this town."

And the gun control nuts accuse of proposing extreme and bizarre measures when we suggest that law-abiding adults should be able to defend themselves.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
 
Imagine if the Victims Were Blacks and the Killers Were White

Then this news story would be everywhere. It would be on the nightly news every day for a while, and then every week--rather like the Duke athletes rape case. But this one is getting no national attention:
(CNSNews.com) - The national news media demonstrates a double standard in covering "hate crimes," as evidenced by the lack of attention given to the murder of a white couple in Tennessee last January, a conservative columnist charged on Monday.

However, a media analyst responded that a crime is not necessarily a hate crime simply because the victims are white and those accused of perpetrating it are black.

Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, were out on a dinner date in Knoxville, Tenn. on Jan. 6, when they were carjacked, kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered.

According to published news reports, the two were tortured at length in each other's presence, strangled and shot. Newsom's mutilated and burned remains were found along a railroad track the following day. Two days later, Christian's battered and burned body was found in a trash bin.

Five men and a woman, all African-American, have been arrested and face up to 46 charges, including carjacking, kidnapping, rape, premeditated murder, theft and robbery.
And that account really does convey the barbarism of what was done to the Christian and Newsom. Michelle Malkin has a video presentation here that tells you more than you probably want to know.

It isn't like there's no local coverage of this horrifying crime for the national news media to use. Like here. If they really wanted to play up the white racism angle, there's this news story here, about white racists trying to stir up trouble with this. (It really says a lot about how far Tennessee has come. A crime this horrifying in 1950 would have probably led to a race riot and mass lynching.) And it seems to have woken the locals that they need to be ready to fight back:

Interest in self-defense has boosted inquiries about handgun carry permits in Knoxville, firearms instructors say, although Virginia Tech wasn't the main impetus.

"The carjacking really kicked it off," said Sgt. Mike Lett of the Knox County Sheriff's Office, referring to the January torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Lett teaches the required course for handgun carry applicants at the sheriff's training facility.
At news.google.com, "Christian Newsom" brings up 13 news stories--not a single one of them from the mainstream media.

Liberalism is a morally bankrupt and utterly depraved system of thought.

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Why Don't They Repeal the Law of Gravity, Too?

San Francisco's mayor is hot to do something about guns--but it would help if they knew what the current laws are, I think:

Mayor Gavin Newsom quietly introduced a package of gun control measures on Tuesday that would make it illegal to possess guns on city-owned property and require residents to store handguns in locked containers.

Huh? You can't lawfully carry a loaded firearm in any city in California (including San Francisco) without a concealed carry license (Cal. Penal Code sec. 12031). You can't lawfully transport even an unloaded firearm except to or from a range, your home, a gun store or repair facility or a few other exceptional situations unless that gun is visible (Cal. Penal Code secs. 12025, 12026, and 12026.1). You can, theoretically, walk through San Francisco with an unloaded firearm, as long as it is openly carried. If you feel like giving it a try, tell us where you want the flowers delivered. The only thing that might prevent you from being shot to death by the San Francisco Police Department would be that they have such lousy aim. (I'm thinking of an incident some years ago where they fired over a hundred shots inside of a bank at a guy that was armed with a dummy grenade--and no gun.)

Cal. Penal Code sec. 12035 already makes it a criminal offense if a civilian:
keeps any loaded firearm within any premises that are under his or her custody or control and he or she knows or reasonably
should know that a child is likely to gain access to the firearm without the permission of the child's parent or legal guardian and
the child obtains access to the firearm and thereby causes death or great bodily injury to himself, herself, or any other person.
This isn't quite a requirement to keep a gun locked up, but it is already a pretty strong encouragement to keep the gun locked up.

But, even some of the legislation's co-sponsors conceded the proposals will have little effect on the proliferation of illegal guns on San Francisco streets.

Newsom, who plans to formally announce the measures at a press conference in the Bayview district today , said there "needs to be common sense restrictions on gun ownership."

"We should continue our efforts to restrict the use of legal guns and we will continue our efforts to stem the tide of illegal guns," Newsom said.

The measures would make it illegal to possess or sell guns or ammunition on any city-owned property, including parks and public buildings.

Huh? Penal Code sec. 12072(d) prohibits firearm transfers in California except through a licensed dealer or police department--with exceptions for antiques and within family. If there are people selling guns on public property in San Francisco, they are already breaking the law.

Though there is only one gun store located in San Francisco, the legislation targets licensed dealers by requiring them to provide police with an inventory list every six months so that authorities could keep track of how many guns are sold. "It's about that one gun shop and making a statement to anyone who's thinking about opening up," said District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is one of several politicians who have signed on to co-sponsor the legislation.

"It's focused on making it as inconvenient and as difficult as possible for people to possess guns in a way that people will be harmed," she added.
Let's see: to buy a gun in California--a handgun, a rifle, or a shotgun--you need to pass a background check and waiting period. And the requirements are actually pretty stiff:
Any person who has been convicted of a felony, certain misdemeanors, certain firearms offenses, who is addicted to narcotics, who is the subject of a domestic violence restraining order, or has been committed to a mental institution pursuant to Welfare and Institutions Code section 8100, may not possess or have under his or her control any firearm. See Prohibiting Categories. PDF logo [PDF 10 kb / 1 pg] Certain federal statutes impose lifetime and other more restrictive prohibitions on firearm possession. Additionally, certain statutory conditions exist that allow for the possession of firearms but preclude the acquisition or purchase of additional firearms, such as the subjects of certain restraining orders and those under state or federal indictment.
It is already quite inconvenient to buy a gun in California, and it hasn't worked--so San Francisco wants to continue down a path that hasn't worked.

UPDATE: A reader who lives in the area points out that the ban on sales on public property is aimed at the Cow Palace gun shows. The Cow Palace is one of those weird situations where it is apparently partly in the City and County 0f San Francisco*, and partly in San Mateo County, but the land is entirely owned by the City and County of San Francisco*. But as this reader points out, if they had such a law--and used it prohibit sales by licensed gun dealers at the Cow Palace (who have to go through background checks and waiting periods), you can be sure it would never be used to prosecute criminals selling guns in city parks.

* The City and County of San Francisco is one of those weird little quirks of California--where they don't just engage in sexual perversion, but political entity perversion as well. California, like most Western states, has counties and cities. There are often several incorporated cities within a county, as well as large areas that are unincorporated, and thus under county control only. If you live in a city, the police department is supposed to protect you. If you live in the unincorporated part of the county, the sheriff's department is who you call. In some smaller cities in the state, the sheriff's department actually provides police services, and the deputy sheriff in charge is given the title of police chief. But that's relatively unusual.

San Francisco at some point expanded out so rapidly that there was nothing left within the County of San Francisco that wasn't also the City of San Francisco, so they merged together, into the California political equivalent of a transsexual. (This means that everywhere in California statutes where they refer to a "county" or "city" they have to throw the political entity pervert in as well: Cal. Penal Code sec. 148.3: "(a) Any individual who reports, or causes any report to bemade, to any city, county, city and county,...") There is a sheriff--but he pretty much runs the jail, provides protection to the courts and city hall, and serves warrants. Law enforcement is primarily done by the San Francisco Police Department. In most California cities, there is a city council and a mayor, and the county is run by a board of supervisors. In San Francisco, the county aspect wins out, mostly, and so they elect a board of supervisors (and among the most deranged elected officials that America has ever seen)--but they also elect a mayor.

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Anthropogenic Global Warming Converts

Senator Imhofe's blog has a list of prominent scientists who have changed sides
--those who used to believe that global warming was entirely or largely man's doing, and no longer believe it. Here's a couple of samples:

Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.” Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers” mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”

Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.” A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.” Wiskel now says “the truth has to start somewhere.” Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000 years, Wiskel told the Canadian newspaper, “If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern. But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years." Wiskel also said that global warming has gone "from a science to a religion” and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy. "If you funnel money into things that can't be changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed,” he said.

And the chances of finding out about this from watching the mainstream media? About zero.

Oh yeah, here's a European politician with enough integrity to call it for what it is:

PRAGUE, Czech Republic: Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Wednesday called for a rational debate on global warming, rejecting what he called "hysteria" driven by enviromentalists.

"Let's bring the debate to whether the 0.6 (degree Celsius warming over the last century) is much or little, how much Man has contributed to the warming and ... if there is anything at all Man can do about it," Klaus said when presenting his book "Blue, Not a Green Planet."

He charged that groups other than scientists have now seized on the topic and ambitious environmentalists are fueling a global warming hysteria that has no solid ground in fact and allows manipulation of people.

"It is about a key topic of our time, and that is the topic of human freedom and its curtailment," Klaus said.

"The approach of environmentalists toward nature is similar to the Marxist approach to economic rules, because they also try to replace free spontaneity of the evolution of the world (and of mankind) with ... global planning of the world's development," Klaus writes in his book.

"That approach ... is a utopia leading to completely other than wanted results," he says.


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If True, Someone Needs to Go Away

Assuming that the BATF's claims are correct, this is exactly the sort of activity that BATF is supposed to be doing--but doesn't seem to do very often:

JEFFERSON, La. (AP) — Federal agents seized hundreds of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition from a suburban New Orleans gun store Wednesday, accusing the owner and two employees of illegal sales that have helped fuel a burgeoning crime problem in the area.

More than 2,300 firearms sold from Elliot's Gun Shop in the past five years have been tied to crimes in the metropolitan area, including 125 to murder investigations and 500 to illegal drug crimes, said Dave Harper, special agent in charge for the New Orleans field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

...


Authorities said they uncovered a scheme at the shop that included forging law enforcement officers' signatures and using a photocopy of the officers' law enforcement credentials to purchase handguns from a New York-based distributor at discounted prices.

The distributor has cooperated with the investigation and is not suspected of any wrongdoing, Harper said.

The gun shop also allegedly helped a man — who turned out to be an informant — make an illegal gun purchase as a straw purchase, which is when someone who is eligible to buy firearms fills out the paperwork and buys the firearm, then gives it gun to someone prohibited from buying the weapon because of a criminal record.

Harper said guns sold from the store had an extremely short "time to crime," or the time from the sale of the firearm to the recovery of the firearm during a crime investigation.

I've seen the claim that a relatively small number of gun dealers--just a few percent of the total--are the source for the vast majority of guns that are criminally misused. I don't know if this is because some dealers are on the edge of vast ghettos, or if they are counting a few dealers who sell vast quantities of guns (and perhaps have no disproportionate number of "crime guns" because of it). But I do not find it hard to believe that there are a few dealers who are so intent on maximizing profit that they knowingly engage in sales to criminals.

I remember some years ago reading about two guys in Los Angeles who obtained a Federal Firearms License, and over a period of several months, purchased and sold--without any paperwork at all--more than 800 guns, operating out of a van in South Central Los Angeles. It was not a few technical violations, nor was it ignorance--they were just intent on making a pile of money, very quickly. They were convicted of more than 800 felonies--and received nine months and twelve months, respectively, in prison.

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Postage Went Up...

And not just first class mail. The Priority Mail Flate Rate Box went from $8.10 to $8.95, so I had to go through and update the ScopeRoller web page with slightly higher prices. I'm not whining about this; any service that delivers things is going to be hit by the increase in gasoline prices.

It was a good excuse to go through and start using the PayPal shopping cart scheme instead of just the BuyNow buttons. It still isn't beautiful, but it is at least a bit more maintainable than it was before.


 
Bad Analogies

One of the great weaknesses of argument by analogy is that sometimes A isn't equivalent to B. Here's a good example: Arnold Kling's discussion of health insurance by analogy to prostitution:

Once upon a time in America, an employer came up with an idea for saving on payroll expenses. He noticed that many of his employees seemed uncomfortable with the idea of paying for sex, even though they wanted it. So he tried reducing worker salaries by $1000 a month, and instead he gave his workers an insurance card that they could present to prostitutes whenever the workers wanted their services. Paying for the card cost only $500 a month per worker, so the employer made higher profits.

A few years later, a major war broke out, and the government put limits on worker salaries. Employers were unable to give raises. Instead, many employers copied the idea of prostitution insurance, and the government winked, allowing employers to circumvent the salary limits.

After the war was over and salary limits were lifted, the practice of offering prostitution insurance remained widespread. In part, this was because income tax rates were now higher than they had ever been, and prostitution insurance was an untaxed fringe benefit.

Two decades after the war, a President with a compassionate agenda won a landslide re-election victory. He delivered on campaign promises to use taxpayer funds to provide prostitution insurance to the poor and to the elderly.

Let's make a list of some of the differences:

1. No one ever died from lack of sex.

2. It has never been unlawful in America to pay for medical care, and with a very few exceptions, there is no one who regards medical care as immoral.

3. The cost of medical care is especially amenable to insurance, because you can go for months or even years without requiring medical care--but if you do suddenly need it, the cost of that care can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There are legitimate arguments against the government being in the health insurance business. Arguments by false analogy such as this one by Kling are offensively absurd.

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Tuesday, May 15, 2007
 
Humor

A friend who lives in the Bay Area pointed me to this very funny item on the Bay Area Craig's List "Rants and Raves" section (which is in danger of disappearing because liberals don't like him):
I buy ammo at a local Big5 Sporting Goods because they always have it (at least the common stuff) and the prices are good. Just the week before last they had R-P 9mm JHP for under $6/box with an additional 10% discount if you bought ten boxes.

Here in the People's Republic, most people have never even seen a gun so I frequently get funny looks/comments/questions from both employees and other customers. I find it amusing and expect it when I go in there now, so I try to have a snappy comeback. Here are some examples from a few recent visits:

CHECKOUT GIRL (Afraid to touch a brick of .22's): Is it OK to, like, put this in a bag?
ME: Yeah, probably. They hardly ever go off by themselves.

GUY IN FRONT OF ME IN LINE: Wow! What do you have there?
ME: That's 1000 rounds of 9mm.
GUY: And how many bullets are in a "round"?
ME: I hope only one.

WOMAN IN LINE (looking at the 10 boxes of ammo I'm carrying): I can't believe they let you just carry that through the store.
ME: Well, the last time I drove up to the ammo counter they told me to leave my car outside from now on.

CHECKOUT GIRL: Are these for a handgun?
ME: Yup.
GIRL: Are you a cop?
ME: Nope.
GIRL: I thought only cops could own handguns.
ME (whispering): Don't tell anyone.

... and finally:

WHINY WOMAN IN LINE: I don't know why anybody would need so many "bullets".
ME: I'll bet there are a whole lot of things you don't know.

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I Thought They Were Pretty Crazy

I'm reading Rael Jean Issac and Virginia C. Armat's Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill (New York: Free Press, 1990) at the moment. I'm quite impressed. It's well written, with passion, but without (so far) taking any integrity shortcuts to win sympathy for their position. Much of what they have to say I have been able to match in other sources--and as I usually do, when I find an interesting, astonishing, and especially "too good to be true" fact, I try to verify it. So far, they are doing just fine.

Anyway, in their discussion of how our society abandoned the notion of mental illness (with prominent psychiatrists and sociologists arguing that mental illness does not exist), they mention the fusion of radical politics with the anti-psychiatric movement:
While the contribution of radical therapists in the United States was chiefly rhetorical, in Europe the mixture of left-wing politics and anti-psychiatry proved explosive. In the venerable university town of Heidelberg, a Socialist Patients Collective, formed in 1970, rapidly transformed itself from a patients group to a political organization. It propounded such doctrines as "illness and capital are identical: the intensity and extent of illness multiply in proportion to the accumulation process of dead capital." In her 1988 book The Europeans, Jane Kramer points that most of the "second generation" of Baader-Meinhof terrorists came out of this group. She writes:
They followed a psychiatrist guru by the name of Wolfgang Huber--a kind of Leninist R.D. Laing, who convinced the people in his charge that the society was their real disease, and apparently inspired a lot of them to try to cure it.
If you are too young to know who Baader-Meinhof was--well, here's a quick intro.

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Down the Memory Hole

Remember in 1984, where Winston's job was to revise newspapers of the past to keep up with the ever changing present? This is very interesting. A couple years ago, during the Katrina disaster, I linked to a CNN report and quoted it:
Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming through the city, CNN's Chris Lawrence reported.

One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks.

"It's a war zone, and they're not treating it like one," he said, referring to the federal government. ...
One of my readers ran into that posting of mine--and noticed that the CNN report at that link no longer said anything like that. It was much, much more upbeat. Nothing about the police snipers on the roof. Did I copy the wrong link? Did I have a brief attack of delusion, and make something up?

Nope. Lots of other people linked to that same CNN page, and quoted the same text. Like http://paulsplanet.blogspot.com/2005/09/fall-of-new-orleans_02.html and http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002476.html .

There were bloggers who quoted CNN exactly as I did, although with no link to the story: http://knemeyer.com/dk.cfm?a=cms,c,318,1 and http://www.flaregun.org/?feed=rss2&p=51 and http://gutternickle.net/blog/index.php/2005/09/02/something_i_don_t_want_to_forget_about_k

Did something go down the memory hole? If that story was inaccurate, they should have identified it as inaccurate, and updated it. This dramatic transformation of a story that played a big part in creating bad press for President Bush really smacks of something very Orwellian.

"We have always been at war with Eastasia."

UPDATE: As Rite Wing Techno Pagan calls it, "Changeable News Network."

Instapundit readers: welcome! Feel free to come back now and again. I don't produce quite the volume of postings as Instapundit--but I do give a somewhat more conservative perspective.

I went to the Internet Archive site, but unfortunately the first archive they have of that page is from December 10, 2005--and it is the "improved" version.

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I Am Always Impressed How Smart My Readers Are

I mentioned here the engineering problem I was confronting on rebuilding Big Bertha, and the formulae provided by a reader for calculating deflection under load. I pulled together the appropriate data, and this is what I found.

First of all: I discovered that Young's modulus is expressed in Pascals (the metric unit of pressure). Because the Pascal is defined as one newton of force over a one square meter area, I needed to convert all my numbers from centimeter/gram/second to meter/kilogram/second.

Next, I used the equations to figure out the moment of inertia for a solid rectangle, rectangular tube, and a square tube. (I'm not considering the use of a round tube, simply because it is harder to get a solid connection between two pieces of metal if one of them is trying to roll.)

I plugged in dimensions for several commonly available 6061 aluminum shapes, and the moment of inertia came out like this:





sectionmoment of inertiakilograms per meter
rectangular solid (2" x 0.5")0.0000000000091.74
rectangular tube (3" x 1" with .125" wall)0.0000000071.63
square tube (2" x 2" with .125 wall)0.0000001261.63


You can see what a difference a square tube makes relative to a rectangular tube of the same weight, or a rectangular solid that weighs slightly more!

There are two loads to consider for computing deflection: the point load (which assumes a weight that is concentrated at one point), and the load that the weight of the tube itself inflicts. When I plugged in those formulae, using a weight of 40 pounds for the mirror end of the telescope (which is by far the heaver load) and a distance of 40 inches (it will actually be a bit less, depending on the balance point), the square tube gave a deflection of .00069 meters for the point load, and .00056 for the beam load. I'm told that adding these together is probably sufficiently accurate for these purposes, so that comes to .00072 meters, or about .028".

That's not quite sufficient (especially because it will vary depending on whether the telescope is pointing horizontally or vertically), so I could either go to a larger tube, or plan on using two of them. Going to a 3" x 3" x .125" tube more than triples the moment of inertia, and knocks the deflection down to .008". I suspect that it may make more sense to use two or even four of the 2" square tubes instead. I don't know exactly how they would reinforce each other, but I suspect that two tubes would halve the point load per tube.

UPDATE: One advantage of using a single large tube to mount everything--it makes it easy to adjust distances. When you are doing astrophotography, you either need a lot of adjustment range in the focuser, or you have to move the mirror closer to the camera than would be needed for visual use (typically 2" to 2.5" closer). It would be fairly use to drill two sets of holes in the base tube: one set for mounting the diagonal/eyepiece/finder cage at astrophotography distance, and another set for visual distance. It might even be possible to do this on a sliding mechanism with set screws to lock everything into position.

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Too Stupid To Stay Out of the Hospital

Here's one of those reminders that if you are stupid enough, you don't even need a gun to shoot yourself:
LAKE LUZERNE, N.Y. (AP) - A teenager who put bullets in a vise and whacked them with a hammer to empty the brass shell casings was wounded in the abdomen by approximately the 100th bullet he hit, according to Warren County deputies.

Damion M. Mosher, 18, had been discharging .223-caliber rounds, placing them in a steel vise, putting a screwdriver on the primer, and striking the screwdriver with the hammer, deputies said.

Deputies were called to his home in Lake Luzerne shortly after 5 p.m. Saturday when one bullet went about a half-inch into his abdomen. He was treated at Glens Falls Hospital and was released. No charges were filed.

Mosher told authorities he was trying to empty the rounds to collect the brass casings for scrap.

Sheriff Larry Cleveland said about 100 other rounds that Mosher hit had "fizzled," but one was somehow sent with more force. It was unclear if the bullet ricocheted or hit him directly.

An employee of Capitol Scrap Co. in Albany said Monday the business pays $1.70 a pound for scrap brass shell casings.

Cleveland said Mosher's shells amounted to just a few pounds.
This just makes me scratch my head in wonder. Fired brass is certainly worth something, enough that after going shooting, I usually pick up my brass. But unfired ammunition is worth a lot more! Brand new, the cheapest .223 is about .22 cents a round. I'm sure that with a little effort, Mosher could have sold that 100 rounds for $2 to someone--and that would have been worth a lot more than he was going to get for the brass.

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An Amusing Questionnaire

Idaho Values Alliance sent out a questionnaire to the nineteen candidates for an open seat on the Idaho Supreme Court, asking them to express "agree" or "disagree" with various statements. I was amused when I saw the questionnaire, because I recognized that most of these statements were taken verbatim from the Idaho Constitution--and it turns out that, according to this press release from the Idaho Values Alliance, that this was the goal--to see which of the candidates agreed with our state constitution, and which did not. (Perhaps more worrisome, to see which candidates even recognized where these phrases came from.)

None of the candidates responded to the questionnaire, apparently out of concern that taking a position might show that they had prejudged issues that might come before them. But how can you call it prejudging an issue to admit that you agree or disagree with the Idaho Constitution? Isn't that what you are supposed to be following when you sit on the Idaho Supreme Court?

UPDATE: Professor Volokh points out that someone might disagree with these provisions of the state constitution, and yet still be willing to follow them in making decisions. I suspect that if any candidate had responded, "I disagree with this provision, but I will follow the Idaho Constitution in making decisions," it would have been a pretty positive sign for that candidate's integrity.

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Another Billionaire Intent On Putting the Democrats in the White House

This article from the May 15, 2007 Washington Times is quite worrisome
:
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is prepared to spend an unprecedented $1 billion of his own $5.5 billion personal fortune for a third-party presidential campaign, personal friends of the mayor tell The Washington Times.

"He has set aside $1 billion to go for it," confided a long-time business adviser to the Republican mayor. "The thinking about where it will come from and do we have it is over, and the answer is yes, we can do it."

Another personal friend and fellow Republican said in recent days that Mr. Bloomberg, who is a social liberal and fiscal conservative, has "lowered the bar" and upped the ante for a final decision on making a run.

The mayor has told close associates he will make a third-party run if he thinks he can influence the national debate and has said he will spend up to $1 billion. Earlier, he told friends he would make a run only if he thought he could win a plurality in a three-way race and would spend $500 million -- or less than 10 percent of his personal fortune.
People that call themselves "social liberal and fiscal conservative" might be mistaken for libertarians, but Bloomberg certainly is not that. His gun control ferocity alone should tell you that he is not libertarian. If he was running because he expected to win, I could perhaps see this as an ambitious billionaire trying to buy the White House, but the article makes it clear that he intends to be a spoiler:
The Bloomberg team is studying the strategies of Mr. Perot, the Texas billionaire whose 1992 presidential campaign helped President Clinton to win the White House with 43 percent of the popular vote.

"Mike has been meeting with Ross Perot's most senior people about how they did an independent run in 1992," the Bloomberg business adviser said on condition of anonymity so as to avoid appearing to speak for Mr. Bloomberg.
My guess is that Bloomberg is considering blowing a billion dollars to pull enough votes from the Republican nominee so that the Democratic nominee will win the White House. Being a billionaire, his natural inclinations are going to be with the Democrats, and against any sort of conservative. If George Soros were a native-born citizen, I suspect that he would pull the same stunt to make sure that the left wins.

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Interesting Blog Posts By Michael Williams

I've been too busy to read Michael Williams' blog--which is a sign that I am too busy--and there's some interesting stuff there. Here he does the math to point out that American produced biofuels aren't every going to be a big chunk of our energy consumption:
So assuming our coal and oil consumption haven't grown since 2000 (unlikely) and assuming a generous ratio of biomass to biofuel conversion, the United States could generate about 18% of the power it consumes by converting 100% of its arable land to biofuel production.
He also points to a New York Times article about Japan's criminal justice system, and how it relies heavily on coerced confessions--and then has to release these people years later, when they turn out to be innocent:
Norimitsu Onishi makes it sound as if Japanese police don't even do proper investigations or gather evidence, they just pick a suspect, coerce a confession, and then rely on that confession alone for a conviction.
This wasn't a surprise to me. Dave Kopel's book The Samurai, The Mountie, and The Cowboy makes the point that part of how the Japanese police achieve 99% conviction rates--with something 95% of suspects confessing--is that they rely on torture. Even though it is illegal, and suspects often still have marks of torture visible when they come to court--Japanese judges routinely refuse to do anything about it.

Finally, Michael Williams points to this Michael Barone column about how the big cities on the coasts are fast turning into the Third World--a small number of extremely rich people and fast quantities of desperately poor people:
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
Michael and his wife left Los Angeles for this reason:
Sounds about right to me; my wife and I left Los Angeles because we're neither rich nor immigrant laborers.
This is part of why liberals are so dangerous for America. While they talk about "two Americas" one rich, one poor, they are the major forces causing this increasingly Third World divide. They want illegal immigrants to come here in large numbers because this provides them with cheap maids; cheap gardeners; cheap busboys and kitchen help in their fashionable restaurants; and cheap prostitutes. If liberals really believed their own garbage about helping the working poor, they would be willing to shut off illegal immigration, so that wages of citizens and lawful immigrants would rise.


Monday, May 14, 2007
 
Low Academic Standards

One of the reasons that I get a bit irritated with identity politics "academic" programs in universities is that they are so often stronger in polemics than in research. I scratched my head about this supposed "Mercury 13" program. The claim is that these women entered astronaut training in the early 1960s, only to be scrubbed because of sexism. It was certainly possible, but I had never heard anything about it before, and unless it was intended as a response to the Soviet Union's female cosmonaut program, it seemed most unlikely.

James Oberg, who has spent entire entire life involved with the space program, has a devastating account of the dishonesty of the University of Wisconsin, and the credulity of journalists, who overwhelming bought the press releases, without any serious attempt at finding out what the real story was:

Truth #1: However impressive may have been the flight experience of the women undergoing the medical testing in 1960–1961, no white male with similar qualifications would ever have gotten a second glance by the NASA astronaut screening process. UW-Oshkosh and the press reports conceal this by equating all “flight experience” as of equivalent value for future astronaut candidates—small aircraft, commercial transport, jet transport, and even supersonic single-seat jet fighter—all are counted as of equal value.

Truth #2: There was no NASA program to even investigate whether women could pass the preliminary screening processes for astronaut selection. The activity was a private one sponsored by a doctor who was an independent consultant to NASA on astronaut selection.

Truth #3: There never was any training: all the activities involved medical screening.

Truth #4: The project ended after the investigator, Dr. Lovelace, had scheduled some screening time at the US Navy’s Pensacola flight training center and the Navy asked him for a charge number from the government sponsor of the project. He stalled all he could—there was no such sponsor—and the frustrated but still willing naval doctors finally called NASA to find out what was going on. When they found out that neither NASA nor any other government customer was sponsoring the tests, they told Lovelace that he had to pay or cancel. He cancelled his reservation. But there was no “program” that got “cancelled”, because there never had been any program to begin with.

Truth #5: There was no significant secrecy attached to any of activities, and no secrecy at all within a few months. The women’s activities were described in depth in contemporary press accounts and then in Congressional testimony.

All of these historical facts are easy to document and verify, but not a single journalist or academic shows any signs of ever doing so. Instead, they just accepted all of the assertions and cultural and social accusations of the university’s website and one particular book.

Although press reports quote a communications professor as claiming she assigned the book to her freshman class, it turns out that the university’s website states that a university panel had assigned the book to the entire freshman class. On a program called “The Common Intellectual Experience”, the university directed all incoming students to read the book, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight by Holyoke University Department of Women’s Studies professor Martha Ackmann.


UPDATE: A reader actually took flying lessons from one of the "Mercury 13" in 1972; she mentioned it, and that "it was a mad enthusiasm of one or a small number of people, and it never went anywhere; she certainly never had any direct dealings with NASA." The reader suggests that the real reason it went nowhere wasn't even sexism, but that military test pilots (who were almost all the early astronauts) were regarded as having signed up for hazardous duty, and there would little political fallout if they were killed in flight.

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Mechanical Engineering Question

Young's Modulus tells you have much a piece of metal will bend under strain; it's a measure of stiffness. This website (which sounds like they know what they are doing) claims that titanium and aluminum are about 5% stiffer than steel for the same weight. Steel is much stiffer for the same thickness than aluminum, but steel is about 7.8 g/cc, while aluminum is about 2.7 g/cc. For the same stiffness as steel, you use a much thicker piece of aluminum--but you can still end up ahead on weight--and weight matters for this application.

I'm looking to rebuild Big Bertha in a form that is substantially lighter. Right now, it is unnecessarily heavy--perhaps 250 pounds, which is absurd, considering that the optics, eyepiece focuser, and mounting hardware for the optics weigh perhaps 45 pounds. If I just replaced the current wooden superstructure with Sonotube, I can get the telescope down to 110 pounds--perhaps less. But an equatorial mount that would handle it would cost $6000--and even then, it would be a bit heavy for that mount.

There's a saying in backpacking that every pound you take off your feet is equivalent to five to six pounds out of your backpack. The same is true with telescopes: for every dollar you spend taking weight off the telescope, you can save many dollars on the mount itself. As an example, the Losmandy GM-8 mount that I have is nominally capable of carrying a 30 pound instrument, and costs about $1500. The next step up is the G-11, nominal capacity 60 pounds, and costs about $2200. The next step from there is the HGM Titan, nominal capacity 100 pounds, and costs about $6000. I don't even look at the step up from that; it makes my wallet scream in agony to even think about it (and even the HGM Titan causes me to cringe at the price).

I don't know that I can get Big Bertha light enough to fit on a G11, but if I can, it is worth spending a bit of money lightening it up enough to do so. If it is just too heavy for a G-11, then it will be at least light enough to cause no strain for the HGM Titan.

So, one strategy is to build an octagonal skeleton tube, using eight aluminum tubes 81" long, cross braced with perhaps 1/4" thick aluminum flats, all bolted together with stainless steel bolts. How thin can the 81" long tubes be, and still provide sufficient stiffness once cross braced? I need it to be stiff enough that even with roughly 38 pounds at one end (where the mirror is), and about 7 pounds at the other end (diagonal mirror, its holder, and the eyepiece focuser), the deformation of those tubes by gravity will be barely measurable, or not measurable at all. (The telescope will be mounted at approximately the center of gravity, with a plate that will bolt to two of the long tubes.)

There must be a way to calculate this--I know that mechanical engineers don't do everything by experiment.

The telescope pictured here might be another strategy. It uses a single, extremely stiff member to hold the two ends in the correct positions. Perhaps this is another approach, since this very stiff member could also be the dovetail plate that slides into the telescope mount saddle. One other aspect of this design that is attractive--it is possible to disassemble it quickly into two "rings": the top one carries the eyepiece focuser, diagonal, and finder, and the bottom ring carries the primary mirror. These can attach to the base with several bolts, making it quickly come apart into two relatively light and compact parts, and one very long rail.

UPDATE: One of my readers responded with:
There's a measure of flexural rigidity for a beam which you can use to compare some alternatives (it doesn't account for twisting though). It's simply the elastic modulus of the material multiplied by the cross-sectional moment of inertia (E*I).

The moment of inertia for a solid circular rod is I = pi * (d^4) / 64. For a tube, you just subtract the inner moment from the outer one.

Circular Tube: I = pi * (d1^4-d2^4) / 64 or I = pi * (d^4-(d-t)^4) / 64
Solid Rectangle: I = b*h^3 / 12
Rectangular Tube: I = (b1*h1^3 - b2*h2^3) / 12
Square Tube: I = (w^4 - (w-t)^4)/12

For a point load (W) at the end of a weightless beam supported firmly at the other end, the vertical deflection at the loaded end is:

dy = W*L^3 / (3*E*I)

The angle of rotation at the end of the beam is:

theta = W*L^2 / (2*E*I)

You can consider the weight of the beam a distributed load (q, in lbs/in for example), so without a point load you have:

dy = q*L^4 / (8*E*I)
theta = q*L^3 / (6*E*I)

It's probably accurate enough (for small deflections anyway) to just add the results of both sets of calculations together for the net effect.
Where the ^ indicates exponentiation.

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Need Someone To Make My ScopeRoller Page Look Better

I just finished chopping up the ScopeRoller web page into multiple pages--it was just taking too long to load. I still can't claim that it looks terribly professional. At the same time, I'm not sure that I want to spend vast quantities of money to make it look like I'm the size of IBM. If one of my readers wants to make a little money polishing the current content, get in touch.

I'm not a big fan of frames, and I don't like complicated background patterns. But if you can figure out a way to make it look a bit less like a piece of handcoded primitive HTML, I'm all ears.


 
Some Are More Equal Than Others

I mentioned a couple of weeks back how the ACLU's concern about double jeopardy had formerly caused them to be skeptical of federal "hate crime" laws--but now that sexual orientation is in a new federal bill...well, that changes everything. Now the Washington Post is joining in:
Because if it passes the Senate, which could vote on it next month, and gets past a threatened presidential veto, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability would join race, religion and national origin as protected classes under the 1969 federal hate-crimes law.This bill has been rattling around Congress in one form or another for nearly 10 years. As time passed, it evolved and incorporated good ideas from both sides of the aisle. And while we have long opposed the inclusion of gender and disability, we believe the bill is worthy of support overall.
So it isn't just the liberal tendency to want to federalize everything. Nor is it a matter of adding sexual orientation to a list of characteristics that liberals think need protection. This Washington Post editorial admits that they "have long opposed the inclusion of gender and disability." It's all about homosexuality--and they are more deserving of federal protection than "gender and disability."

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Sunday, May 13, 2007
 
Neptune and Global Warming

One of those nasty global warming skeptics is pointing to an article about changing brightness of Neptune:
Incredibly, an article has appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters showing a stunning relationship between the solar output, Neptune’s brightness, and heaven forbid, the temperature of the Earth. With its obvious implications to the greenhouse debate, we are certain you have never heard of the work and never will outside World Climate Report.

...

In the recent article, Hammel and Lockwood, from the Space Science Institute in Colorado and the Lowell Observatory, note that measurements of visible light from Neptune have been taken at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona since 1950. Obviously, light from Neptune can be related to seasons on the planet, small variations in Neptune’s orbit, the apparent tilt of the axis as viewed from the Earth, the varying distance from Neptune to Earth, and of course, changes in the atmosphere near the Lowell Observatory. Astronomers are clever, they are fully aware of these complications, and they adjust the measurements accordingly.

As seen in Figure 1, Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980; furthermore, infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that the planet has been warming steadily from 1980 to 2004. As they say on Neptune, global warming has become an inconvenient truth. But with no one to blame, Hammel and Lockwood explored how variations in the output of the Sun might control variations in the brightness of Neptune.



Figure 1 (a) represents the corrected visible light from Neptune from 1950 to 2006; (b) shows the temperature anomalies of the Earth; (c) shows the total solar irradiance as a percent variation by year; (d) shows the ultraviolet emission from the Sun (Source: Hammel and Lockwood (2007)).

What would seem so simple statistically is complicated by the degrees of freedom in the various time series which is related to the serial correlation in the data (e.g., next year’s value is highly dependent on this year’s value). Nonetheless, they find that the correlation coefficient between solar irradiance and Neptune’s brightness is near 0.90 (1.00 is perfect). The same relationship is found between the Earth’s temperature anomalies and the solar output. Hammel and Lockwood note “In other words, the Earth temperature values are as well correlated with solar irradiance (r = 0.89) as they are with Neptune’s blue brightness (|r| > 0.90), assuming a 10-year lag of the Neptune values.” The temporal lag is needed to account for the large mass of Neptune that would require years to adjust to any changes in solar output.

I went to find the article, and while you have to pay to read the whole article, the abstract is free:
Long-term photometric measurements of Neptune show variations of brightness over half a century. Seasonal change in Neptune's atmosphere may partially explain a general rise in the long-term light curve, but cannot explain its detailed variations. This leads us to consider the possibility of solar-driven changes, i.e., changes incurred by innate solar variability perhaps coupled with changing seasonal insolation. Although correlations between Neptune's brightness and Earth's temperature anomaly—and between Neptune and two models of solar variability—are visually compelling, at this time they are not statistically significant due to the limited degrees of freedom of the various time series. Nevertheless, the striking similarity of the temporal patterns of variation should not be ignored simply because of low formal statistical significance. If changing brightnesses and temperatures of two different planets are correlated, then some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment.
Now, Neptune has an interesting history to its brightness variations, and there's a lot of published papers on the subject. This letter published in 1991--with one of the same authors--observes that an existing Neptune and solar cycle relationship had recently changed:

FOR almost two decades, Neptune's brightness varied inversely, at the level of a few per cent, with the solar cycle. The anticorrela-tion was so striking that some causal mechanism seemed necessary, and several suggestions were made1,2. Two different but plausible ideas involving solar-induced global changes in Neptune's atmosphere were a cyclic darkening ('tanning') of stratospheric aerosols caused by varying ultraviolet radiation3 and a variation in the rate of ion-induced nucleation of atmospheric aerosols due to the modulation of galactic cosmic-ray flux by solar activity4. In 1990, with the current solar cycle near its peak, however, Neptune departed unexpectedly from the previous cyclic behaviour, attaining its greatest brightness since 1972. Further observations will be needed to decide if the present deviation signals a unique atmospheric phenomenon, and to see if the cyclic anticorrelation will be restored.
It certainly raises questions about the connections that this recent paper mentions--but notice that even back in 1991, there was a recognition that cosmic-ray flux modulation caused by solar activity might be influencing cloud cover on Neptune. Regular readers will know that I have mentioned previously the research that suggests that global warming here on Earth is related to solar output altering cosmic ray flux. More solar output not only means more sunlight warming up the Earth, but less cosmic ray flux, and less cloud cover--increasing the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface.

I found some of this material over at Classical Values, including a discussion of how NASA has observed some evidence of changes in solar activity that suggest that the solar output increases are about to stop:

May 10, 2006: The Sun's Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "It's off the bottom of the charts," he says. "This has important repercussions for future solar activity."

see captionThe Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle, and that's why the slowdown is important.

Right: The sun's "Great Conveyor Belt" in profile.

"Normally, the conveyor belt moves about 1 meter per second—walking pace," says Hathaway. "That's how it has been since the late 19th century." In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. "We've never seen speeds so low."

According to theory and observation, the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity ~20 years in the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity. The reasons for this are explained in the Science@NASA story Solar Storm Warning.

"The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries," says Hathaway.

This is interesting news for astronauts. Solar Cycle 25 is when the Vision for Space Exploration should be in full flower, with men and women back on the Moon preparing to go to Mars. A weak solar cycle means they won't have to worry so much about solar flares and radiation storms.

As Simon at Classical Values observes:
If sunspots are going to decline in the near future the global warming era may be over. Especially if the sun's effect on Clouds turns out to be affected by solar activity as some scientists have experimentally proved.
Perhaps we have reached the point where the AGW True Believers need to get their tax structure in place now, or worry about the polar bears attacking them when they hold conferences in New York City.

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Materials Choices

I mentioned a while back that I was having trouble finding 2 3/8" UHMW polyethylene for making a particular part. Turning these 2.35" diameter cylinders down from 2.5" stock is slow (at least on a Sherline lathe). I can get 2 3/8" Delrin. Even though it is about $19.50 a foot, vs. $8 a foot for the UHMW, the time savings compensate for the price. It takes about 30 minutes for me to turn three 2.5" diameter by 3.4" long UHMW cylinders down to 2.35" diameter. The 2 3/8" Delrin takes about five minutes to turn down the same three cylinders. The materials cost is $10 more for three cylinders, but it saves me 25 minutes. That's an easy tradeoff.

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Teachers in Need of Firing

Traumatizing children as a "learning experience":
MURFREESBORO, Tennessee (AP) -- Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

"We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

"The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them," said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

Some parents said they were upset by the staff's poor judgment in light of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 students and professors dead, including the gunman.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door.

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Colorado State University's Policy on Concealed Carry

This is a surprising article:
Police at the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Colorado say allowing concealed weapons on campus is more trouble than its worth, but Colorado State University is sticking to its policy that allows permit-holders to carry their guns.

CSU doesn't allow guns in its dormitories, instead forcing students to store their weapons at the police department, but three years ago reaffirmed its concealed-carry policy. The university will review the policy because of the Virginia Tech shootings, though there's no timeline for the review.

CSU's police chief deferred comment to a CSU spokesman, who said the university doesn't have an official opinion about whether allowing or banning concealed weapons improves campus safety. CSU police recommended in 2004 that the school allow permit holders to carry guns.

"There was a lack of concrete information on whether it was safer to allow or not allow (concealed weapons) on campus," university spokesman Brad Bohlander said.

The number of concealed-carry permits issued in Larimer County exploded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2002, the Larimer County Sheriff's Office issued 1,072 concealed weapons permits, which nearly doubled the county's permits to 2,264.

Since then, the number of permits has grown to 3,078. Permits are good for five years.

It's unknown how many of those permit-holders are college students.

Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden denied a Coloradoan request for a list of concealed-weapon permit holders in the county. Under state law, as the custodian of those records, it's up to Alderden to decide whether to release them.

Colorado law allows permit holders to carry their weapons on campus but also allows the governing board of each school to prohibit them, steps UNC and CU have taken.
After recounting the traditional arguments against from the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado University spokesmen:
But count Alderden as an advocate for allowing guns on campus. He also said gun carriers should intervene when they can.

When an area such as a public school or a college campus goes gun-free, there's nothing to deter a would-be shooter because they know there isn't anyone with a concealed weapon in that place, Alderden said.

A faculty member or student with a concealed weapon could have helped the Virginia Tech shooting, which killed 33 people, including the gunman, end differently, Alderden said. He cited the Oct. 1, 1997, shooting at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss., as an example.

On that day, 16-year-old Luke Woodham opened fire with a rifle at the school, killing two girls and wounding seven others before he was confronted by Vice Principal Joel Myrick, who had retrieved his .45-caliber handgun from his car. Myrick chased Woodham down and held him until police arrived.
By comparison, a student at Hamline University in Minnesota merely suggested that the university's gun-free policy was a mistake--and was suspended and ordered to seek psychological counseling:
In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle "Tough Guy Scheffler," Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn't make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

"Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn't have happened if the school wouldn't have banned their permits a few months ago," Scheffler wrote. "I just don't understand why leftists don't understand that criminals don't care about laws; that is why they're criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens' rights."

...

On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he'd been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he'd have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.

The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn't allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he's reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.

"'Oh, he's the crazy guy that they called the cops on.' How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?" Scheffler asks.

He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn't go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. "He had a gun and everything," Bucholz says. Dean Julian Schuster appeared at the beginning of class to explain the presence of the cop, citing discipline problems with a student. Although Schuster never mentioned Scheffler by name, it didn't take a scholar to see whose desk was empty.

Scheffler has tried to get answers from the university, to no avail. On April 25, he called President Hanson's office to request a meeting, but when he told the secretary his name, she claimed the computer system had crashed and she couldn't access the president's schedule. She promised to call Scheffler back, but more than a week later, he's still waiting.

Hamline administrators were similarly circumspect when a reporter called. School officials declined to be interviewed, citing student privacy concerns. Requests for information were diverted to lawyer Rebecca Bernhard, who said Hamline acted appropriately in light of recent events at Virginia Tech. "Hamline takes campus safety very seriously," she says.
Now to be fair, Scheffler had also expressed disapproval of the university's "diversity programs," feeling that they were discriminating against him for being a white male, and I guess by the standards of Hamline University, that makes him a dangerous lunatic.

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The Next Time a Liberal Compares Bush's America to Nazi Germany

Ask them to explain this:
Situated within a dense forest at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on the outskirts of Hancock, New York, Islamberg is not an ideal place for a summer vacation unless, of course, you are an exponent of the Jihad or a fan of Osama bin Laden.

The 70 acre complex is surrounded with "No trespassing" signs; the rocky terrain is infested with rattlesnakes; and the woods are home to black bears, coyotes, wolves, and a few bobcats.

The entrance to the community is at the bottom of a very steep hill that is difficult to navigate even on a bright sunny day in May. The road, dubbed Muslim Lane, is unpaved and marred by deep crevices that have been created by torrential downpours. On a wintry day, few, save those with all terrain vehicles, could venture forth from the remote encampment.

A sentry post has been established at the base of the hill.

The sentry, at the time of this visit, is an African American dressed in Islamic garb - - a skull cap, a prayer shawl, and a loose fitting shalwat kameez. He instructs us to turn around and leave. "Our community is not open to visitors," he says.

Behind the sentry and across a small stream stand dozens of inhabitants of the compound - - the men wearing skull caps and loose fitting tunics, the women in full burqa. They appear ready to deal with any unauthorized intruders.

The hillside is blighted by rusty trailers that appear to be without power or running water and a number of outhouses. The scent of raw sewage is in the air.

The place is even off limits to the local undertaker who says that he has delivered bodies to the complex but has never been granted entrance. "They come and take the bodies from my hearse. They won't allow me to get past the sentry post. They say that they want to prepare the bodies for burial. But I never get the bodies back. I don't know what's going on there but I don't think it's legal."

On the other side of the hill where few dare to go is a tiny village replete with a make-shift learning center (dubbed the "International Quranic Open University"); a trailer converted into a Laundromat; a small, green community center; a small and rather squalid grocery store; a newly constructed majid; over forty clapboard homes; and scores of additional trailers.

It is home to hundreds - - all in Islamic attire, and all African-Americans. Most drive late model SUVs with license plates from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The locals say that some work as tollbooth operators for the New York State Thruway, while others are employed at a credit card processing center that maintains confidential financial records.

While buzzing with activity during the week, the place becomes a virtual hive on weekends. The guest includes arrivals from the inner cities of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and, occasionally, white-robed dignitaries in Ray-Bans from the Middle East.

Venturing into the complex last summer, Douglas Hagmann, an intrepid investigator and director of the Northeast Intelligence Service, came upon a military training area at the eastern perimeter of the property. The area was equipped with ropes hanging from tall trees, wooden fences for scaling, a make-shift obstacle course, and a firing range. Hagmann said that the range appeared to have been in regular use.

...

Islamberg is a branch of Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization formed in 1980 by Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who refers to himself as "the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr," Gilani, has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra or "community of the impoverished," an organization that seeks to "purify" Islam through violence.

Though primarily based in Lahore, Pakistan, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has operational headquarters in New York and openly recruits through various social service organizations in the U.S., including the prison system. Members live in hamaats or compounds, such as Islamberg, where they agree to abide by the laws of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which are considered to be above local, state and federal authority. Additional hamaats have been established in Hyattsville, Maryland; Red House, Virginia; Falls Church, Virginia; Macon, Georgia; York, South Carolina; Dover, Tennessee; Buena Vista, Colorado; Talihina, Oklahoma; Tulane Country, California; Commerce, California; and Onalaska, Washington. Others are being built, including an expansive facility in Sherman, Pennsylvania.

Before becoming a citizen of Islamberg or any of the other Fuqra compounds, the recruits - - primarily inner city black men who became converts in prison - - are compelled to sign an oath that reads: "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake."

In the past, thousands of members of the U.S. branches of Jamaat ul-Fuqra traveled to Pakistan for paramilitary training, but encampments, such as Islamberg, are now capable of providing book-camp training so raw recruits are no longer required to travel abroad amidst the increased scrutiny of post 9/11.

Over the years, numerous members of Jamaat ul-Fuqra have been convicted in US courts of such crimes as conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud. Others remain leading suspects in criminal cases throughout the country, including ten unsolved assassinations and seventeen fire-bombings between 1979 and 1990.

The criminal charges against the group and the criminal convictions are not things of the past. In 2001, a resident of a California compound was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun-smuggling' and twenty-four members of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations.

By 2004 federal investigators uncovered evidence that linked both the DC "sniper killer" John Allen Muhammed and "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid to the group and reports surfaced that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded in the process of attempting to obtain an interview with Sheikh Gilani in Pakistan.

Even though Jamaat ul-Fuqra has been involved in terror attacks and sundry criminal activities, recruited thousands of members from federal and state penal systems, and appears to be operating paramilitary facilities for militant Muslims, it remains to be placed on the official US Terror Watch List. On the contrary, it continues to operate, flourish, and expand as a legitimate nonprofit, tax-deductible charity.

Is someone at Homeland Security not paying attention? Or is this report completely bogus?

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Hypothermia Deaths

I make no pretense that the data is sufficient to prove a connection between deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and people freezing to death--but in 1974, the hypothermia death rate in the U.S. was .164/100,000 people. By 1979, the death rate had doubled to .322/100,000. Hypothermia death rates continued to rise, peaking at .411/100,000 in 1989, before dropping back below .2/100,000 in the late 1990s. Not every person who died of hypothermia was mentally ill, but a detailed study of hypothermia deaths in Washington, DC in the years 1972-82 found that one-third were severely malnourished, with “most discovered in abandoned buildings or vehicles. Four-fifths had not been reported missing. One-half had high blood ethanol levels.”1 It is difficult to read these characteristics, which sound suspiciously like those of mentally ill homeless people in America, and not suspect that the increase in hypothermia death rates was partly because of deinstitutionalization.

1 Nicholas Rango, “Exposure-Related Hypothermia in the United States: 1970-79,” American Journal of Public Health, 74:10[October, 1984] 1159-60; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Compressed Mortality File 1979-1998. CDC WONDER On-line Database, compiled from Compressed Mortality File CMF 1968-1988, Series 20, No. 2A, 2000 and CMF 1989-1998, Series 20, No. 2E, 2003, ICD-9 E901.

UPDATE: Just to clarify: hypothermia death rates fell again in the late 1990s back to roughly mid-1970s rates. Perhaps the increased institutionalization of the mentally ill in prisons--or some other factor--caused this.


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