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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, 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.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. Labels: low standards of journalism 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. Labels: machining 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.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. Labels: immigration 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. Labels: telescopes 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. Labels: gun rights 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.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? Labels: global warming 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. Labels: immigration 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?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." Labels: immigration 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. Labels: homosexuality 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.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." Labels: cross-species breeding 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.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. Labels: immigration 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. Labels: humor 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. Labels: machining, telescopes 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.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. 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. Labels: political correctness 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: How, exactly, would you tell the difference?
Nutter...my, there's an appropriate name. 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. Labels: gun rights 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.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: 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. Labels: political correctness 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: 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 reasonablyThis 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.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.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. Labels: gun rights 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:
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:
Labels: global warming 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: 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. Labels: gun rights 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:
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. Labels: health care 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. Labels: humor 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:If you are too young to know who Baader-Meinhof was--well, here's a quick intro.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. Labels: deinstitutionalization 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 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/?f |
