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Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: concealed carry, gun rights Labels: academic integrity Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: machining Labels: political correctness, terrorism Labels: gun defense aftermath, gun self-defense Labels: intelligent design, political correctness Labels: terrorism Labels: global warming Labels: Alaska cruise Labels: Alaska cruise Labels: gun rights, hypocrisy Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: humor Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: gun rights Labels: child sexual abuse Labels: Alaska cruise, global warming Labels: Alaska cruise Labels: Alaska cruise Labels: enviromental lunacy Labels: homosexuality The city of Hit (pronounced “heat”) is a spot of green in the desert on the western bank of the Euphrates. The temperature is steadily rising here as the weeks melt into the mirage of summer; the haze shimmering at about 115°F now. The air was blowing hot and dry through the city Tuesday morning 29 May, when I accompanied LTC Doug Crissman for another day of meetings with local leaders in Hit and surrounding towns in Anbar Province. Crissman and the soldiers of Task Force 2-7 Infantry under his command have been welcomed in the area of Hit for about the last one hundred days. Prior to February, Hit was one of the hottest little battlegrounds of the war, with almost daily gun battles crackling through the air, mortars exploding on the bases, and bombs cratering the roads. But none of that noise punctuated a visit last Saturday, when LTC Crissman and I walked through the downtown portion of the city. Our several-mile stroll through the market—a veritable shopping mall for the area—was filled with men, women, and children of all ages, including one rotund boy furiously slurping an ice cream before it could drip away. Hit could have swallowed us whole that day. Although there were vehicles nearby in radio contact, we had only two soldiers as guards during our stroll. But the people mostly just waved and smiled, or wanted to talk with Crissman, who stopped now and then to engage in conversations, all while the steam building inside the pressure cookers of our helmets soaked the pads in sweat. Many people in Hit directly attribute the resurrection of this city in large part to the courage of Iraqi Police General Ibrahim Hamid Jaza (General Hamid), who took an aggressive stand against the Al Qaeda (AQI) terrorists who had brazenly made Anbar province a home base and slaughter pad with their marketplace car bombs, beheadings, and reputation for hiding bombs intended to kill parents in the corpses of dead children they’d gutted. Over time, AQI provided ample demonstrations of their ruthless and reckless abuses of power over civilians, shooting people for using the Internet, or watching television, or other “moral transgressions” such as smoking in public. AQI’s claim of fundamentalist piety proved to be a thin veneer that was quickly eroded by blatant drug, alcohol and prostitute use. The people of Anbar rejected AQI, but AQI was still strong and well-armed, so rejection was only a first step. AQI operatives are not amenable to change, so there was killing to be done. General Hamid was one of the brave souls who took an early stand and went for their throats. In doing so, he demonstrated that the terrorists were also vulnerable. Some soldiers in the Task Force 2-7 began to jokingly refer to the general as “Bufford Pusser” because Hamid literally carried a big stick. But AQI wasn’t laughing; they beheaded Hamid’s son on a soccer field in the center of Hit in 2005. About a year ago coalition forces selected Hamid to be the District Chief of Police, confirming his status as a true hero to many Americans and Iraqis. Accordingly, recent signs suggesting that Hamid might have begun flying too close to the sun were a hard and grim reality for officers in both governments, as the evidence of his corruption began to accumulate like so much wax melted off strong wings. Hamid had earned his reputation for being ferocious against terrorists, which might suffice to explain the stunning impact when, without warning or notice, LTC Crissman arrested and detained the general Tuesday afternoon. Labels: terrorism Labels: gun self-defense Labels: gun rights And even that experience won't teach you about condoms. And when you finally fall in love, when you're a senior and old enough to know, with that beautiful, amazing, angelic girl that makes you laugh, and you trust her with your heart, with all of these stories, and more, and making love with her is literally that, an act of creation, that creates more love in the world, and fills you full of light and hope and joy, and you hold her and she holds you and it is as close to heaven as you can get. And you would move mountains for her if you could. And she goes on the pill and she is clean, and you believe her. And you should, because she really loves you, little Antonio, 16 years old. And she forgets to take her pill one day because she's 17, and amazing, but she's not perfect. I know women in their 30s who forget to take their pill. And a little while later, you both make a decision that you'll regret for the rest of your lives—every year, marking how old it would have been. And how it would have been to have been a 17 year-old father. And you're glad that you’ve had that choice, and it makes sense, but why do you have a hole in your heart, all these years later? And you can't go back in time and tell myself that. Was it crudely put in places? Sure. But I'm not sure what else approach would work with a Boulder High School audience. I accepted a job in Boulder a few years back, and my wife and I flew out to look at housing. The more time we spent talking to the locals, the more apparent it became that it was Sonoma County with a view of the Rockies--a place with far more money than parents, and not a good place to raise kids. Labels: low standards of journalism Labels: Alaska cruise Labels: Alaska cruise Labels: gun rights Even after Daniel A. Kelly fired two warning shots, Austin Bodahl continued to pursue him, knocking Kelly down and punching him repeatedly in the head, according to a criminal complaint filed today in Dane County Court. Kelly ended the fight with a fatal shot from his .22-caliber Derringer, authorities say. Bodahl, 23, of Waconia, Minn., had just arrived in Madison on a whim two weeks before he was shot dead on State Street on May 22 shortly before midnight. Kelly was charged today with first-degree reckless homicide and made his initial court appearance on the charge this afternoon. "I fired three warning shots and they kept coming at me," a criminal complaint quotes Kelly telling a bouncer at City Bar, 636 State St., "so I aimed at his stomach and I got him in the chest." Police said the gun was actually fired only three times, with one bullet still in the chamber when the gun was recovered. Kelly, 31, was a schizophrenic who had not been taking his medication, Assistant District Attorney Mike Verveer said at Kelly's initial court appearance today. Arguing to maintain the $100,000 bail set last Friday, Verveer said Kelly poses a threat if let out of jail. "We do have concerns that an obviously unstable man was armed with a handgun on State Street and used it with tragic results," he said. Kelly is a diagnosed schizophrenic who has been off his medication, Verveer said. He said he told Canadian immigration authorities as much when he was turned down entry four times in four days into the country in late 2005. Verveer said he told immigration personnel that people were trying to kill him, and he wanted to tell Canadian authorities about it. An Army veteran who served in Germany and Bosnia, Verveer said Kelly was living largely off of veterans benefits. According to the complaint: Bodahl and two other men, Travis Verastegui and Carl Provin, were speaking with Kelly in the 600 block of State Street when Bodahl and Kelly began arguing, according to a witnesses. Then Bodahl approached Kelly as Kelly was seated on a concrete flowerbed, and tried to punch him in the head, but missed. Kelly, a familiar presence on State Street who wore a green kilt, got to his feet and walked backward as Bodahl pursued, throwing numerous punches. Witnesses reported hearing two popping noises, and Bodahl continued advancing on Kelly as Kelly walked backward onto State Street. Labels: deinstitutionalization A former Arlington County youth sports coach who once headed the Virginia ACLU pleaded guilty yesterday to charges that he purchased child pornography so graphic that prosecutors called it "sadistic." Charles Rust-Tierney, 51, admitted that he accessed more than 850 pornographic images of children as young as 4, including a six-minute video depicting the sexual torture of children set to a song by the band Nine Inch Nails. Authorities said Rust-Tierney used a computer in his 10-year-old son's bedroom to view the files, some of which were contained on CDs bearing an American flag logo. "So these were actual children under the age of 12 engaged in sexual activity?" Judge T.S. Ellis asked. "I'm agreeing to that, yes, your honor," Rust-Tierney said. "Well, is it true or not?" Ellis asked. "Yes, it is," Rust-Tierney replied. Rust-Tierney, a public defender in the District and a past president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced Sept. 7. His attorneys and prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of 8 to 10 years. The guilty plea brought a quiet end to a case that has triggered strong emotions locally and nationally. Rust-Tierney is a former president of Arlington Little League, and more than two dozen people, including numerous fellow lawyers, packed a federal courtroom in March to say that he should be released from jail. Parents of children he has coached wrote letters of support. ... Prosecutors said yesterday that they had identified at least 30 child pornography victims shown in the images and videos Rust-Tierney downloaded and that the images were created in places ranging from England and Texas to Scranton, Pa. Rust-Tierney used his credit card to purchase the images from child pornography Web sites on at least five occasions, spending about $420. At one point, court documents said, Rust-Tierney e-mailed the operators of a Web site requesting free access to a child pornography video normally sold separately for $100. The Web site operators e-mailed back with a link to the video. Rust-Tierney's plea agreement with prosecutors said the images he downloaded showed "sadistic or masochistic conduct." U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan, who declined to release Rust-Tierney at the hearing in March, had described the material on the computer as "the most perverted and nauseating and sickening type of child pornography" she has seen in 10 years on the bench. Labels: ACLU, child sexual abuse, freedom of speech Labels: immigration, terrorism When a faculty panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder last year found Ward Churchill guilty of repeated and intentional instances of research misconduct, the committee included in its report a metaphor for the way many people view the Churchill case: If a police officer doesn’t like the bumper sticker on a driver’s car and so stops the driver for speeding, is a ticket justified as long as the driver was really speeding? Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado System, gave his answer on Friday and it’s clear that to Brown, speeding is speeding. He formally recommended that Churchill, who has tenure as an ethnic studies professor at Boulder, be fired. In a detailed letter to the Board of Regents, Brown said that Churchill’s violations of academic research norms were too serious and too numerous to ignore — regardless of the circumstances that led to all the scrutiny. Brown emphatically rejected the idea that First Amendment issues were raised because the inquiries into Churchill started after his comments about 9/11. Brown noted that more than 25 faculty members were involved in formal reviews of a series of research misconduct charges against Churchill, that none of the charges had anything to do with Churchill’s views, and that “each faculty member, without exception, determined that Professor Churchill engaged in deliberate and repeated research misconduct.” In this context, Brown said it would be wrong to give Churchill a pass because the 9/11 remarks led people to file complaints against him. “The university cannot disregard allegations of serious research misconduct simply because the allegations were made against a professor whose comments have attracted a high degree of public attention,” Brown wrote to the regents. “The prohibition against research misconduct extends to all faculty members, irrespective of their academic disciplines or political views. Were it otherwise, the university could not maintain the integrity of the scholarly enterprise.” Brown concluded his letter to the regents by saying that Churchill deserved to be fired because the research misconduct charges on which he was found guilty were “severe,” “deliberate” and that “Professor Churchill’s misconduct seriously impacts the university’s academic reputation and the reputations of its faculty.” Labels: academic integrity, history Labels: political correctness Health Minister Ab Klink on Thursday called the case "horrible", as the press splashed the news across its front pages. The matter came to light Wednesday, when police said they had arrested three seropositive homosexual men two weeks ago after four victims, men aged 25 to 50, accused them of rape and premeditated bodily harm. Ronald Zwarter, the police chief in the northern town of Groningen, where the alleged crimes took place, said two of those arrested, a couple aged 48 and 33, had confessed. "Their stated motive was that it excited them -- and also that, the more HIV-infected people there were, the better their chances of unprotected sex," he said. "They considered unprotected relations to be 'pure'." A fourth man who allegedly supplied the three suspects with several litres of the date-rape drug GHB and ecstasy tablets was also arrested. The gang risks up to 16 years in prison. According to police and prosecutors, eight more victims have come forward since the case was publicised. Officials said the three seropositive men invited gays contacted on the Internet to private homosexual orgies. When the victims turned up, they were allegedly given ecstasy and GBH (which is undetectable when mixed in drinks), leaving them helpless and, in some cases, with no memory of what happened. The three suspects -- one of whom is a male nurse -- were said to have raped the men, and even injected some of them with a mix of their contaminated blood. The case has deeply unsettled the Netherlands, and caused it to cast a hard look at its easygoing views on sex, with some figures suggesting that frequent homosexual orgies posed a public health risk. "That homos organise orgies is nothing new, but this is something else. This is unimaginable," said Frank van Dalen, the president of a gay rights group called COC. Labels: homosexuality Labels: humor
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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Some Stuff Is Just Too Painful To Research
I've just updated this posting about a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that makes me so angry that I have to go blow off this steam. I am enraged. The ACLU's wonderful theories and the raving morons that made up (and still make up) the Massachusetts high court combine the worst of lawyer arrogance with the most absurd understanding of mental illness. It sounds like this kid has at least a chance of recovering from paranoid schizophrenia--and these arrogant idiots, in pursuit of a fantasy world, pretty well destroyed any chance of that. Isaac and Armat's Madness in the Streets, p. 149, describes the net effect of this decision on his family, and most importantly, on Roe.
I don't care how much good the ACLU has done over the years. The amount of damage that they have done consigns them to one of Dante's lowest circle of hell.
West Virginia Signs A CCW Reciprocity Agreement With Ohio
The Buckeye Firearms Association web site (which I have now added to the blogroll) links to this press release from the West Virginia Attorney-General, announcing that West Virginia and Ohio will now recognize each other's concealed handgun licenses.
I can't seem to find anything that indicates whether West Virginia recognizes all carry permits issued by those other states or not, or limits it to licenses issued to residents of those states. It would be very nice if they recognized all carry permits, because then I could add West Virginia to my list of states in which I'm allowed to carry concealed.
“West Virginians with valid concealed handgun permits are allowed to carry concealed handguns in KY, VA, NC, OH, FL and SD pursuant to existing and new reciprocity agreements. We are currently in active discussion with other states. We have received recognition by Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Vermont, but we do not have a reciprocity agreement with the states,” stated Attorney General Darrell McGraw.
Guillermo Gonzalez: More Impressive Than He Appears?
I mentioned recently Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomy professor who was recently denied tenure in spite of a pretty impressive publication history--and who might have been denied tenure at least partly because of his involvement (off campus) with Intelligent Design. I also mentioned that when I searched for papers by this guy, that there seemed to be two astronomers named Guillermo Gonzalez, one at Iowa State and the other at University of Washington.
A reader with a brother who is a professional astronomer tells me that they are the same guy:It's the same guy. Before Gonzalez came to Iowa, he was at Washington.
If this is correct (and it could be that University of Washington just hasn't taken down Gonzalez's old web page), the Gonzalez has an astonishing publication history. It makes it seem all the more likely that what we are seeing is what the Weekly Standard article claims: discrimination because Gonzalez doesn't toe the party line.
To have authored 68 peer-reviewed papers before tenure is stunning.
Gonzalez leads his department in citation analyses, even though
his more senior colleagues have been working for decades longer.
...
Gonzalez is a rising academic superstar, and what happened
to him is such a travesty that I can't even find words to express
my anger.
UPDATE: I just searched the University of Washington's faculty directory; Gonzalez isn't listed there anymore, so that webpage must be old.
A Decision That Just Makes Me Angry
I mentioned a few days ago a decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that would have been funny, except that they ruled that someone should be allowed to die, because he was too retarded to communicate whether he wanted to live or die.
I've now worked my way up to the "right to refuse treatment" decision that was based on that "substituted judgment" precedent. Unlike the Saikewicz decision, which made a cold chill run up my spine when I read how casually they decided to let this guy die, Guardianship Of Roe, Matter Of, 421 N.E.2d 40, 383 Mass. 415 (1981) makes me angry.
The facts of the case: a young man, identified as Richard Roe III to protect his identity, started messing with illegal drugs sometime in middle school. At 16, he had a schizophrenic breakdown. Over a period of several years, he became aggressive, violent, and was eventually arrested for unarmed robbery, assault and battery, and receiving stolen property. He was hospitalized at the Southampton State Hospital. While hospitalized the second time, he was violent towards others.
Eventually, because the hospital's capacity was limited, he was released. Roe's father was made his guardian under existing state laws because the son was incapable of holding a coherent conversation, and unable to care for himself. (Even the attorney who represented Roe in this suit didn't dispute that his client was insane.)
The psychiatrists at Southampton believed that anti-psychotic medications were going to be necessary--and because Roe had developed a fierce hostility towards drugs because of his earlier drug abuse, they believed that they might need to give them involuntarily. Roe's father, as guardian, went ahead and authorized this.
In much the same way that the judges decided what Saikewicz would have decided to do about chemotherapy, if he were competent, the judges decided to substitute their judgment for that of Roe’s father:If the judge determines that the ward, if competent, would accept the medication, he is to order its administration. If the judge determines that the ward's substituted judgment would be to refuse treatment, we set forth … those State interests which are capable of overwhelming the right to refuse antipsychotic medication.
The Court set a very high standard for allowing Roe’s father to authorize involuntary treatment:Absent an overwhelming State interest, a competent individual has the right to refuse such treatment. To deny this right to persons who are incapable of exercising it personally is to degrade those whose disabilities make them wholly reliant on other, more fortunate, individuals.
What the Court seemed to have missed, however, is that without treatment, Roe would likely remain incompetent to make his own decisions. With treatment, there was at least a chance that Roe would reach a point where he would be sufficiently sane to make his own decisions. In order to accord proper respect to this basic right of all individuals, we feel that if an incompetent individual refuses antipsychotic drugs, those charged with his protection must seek a judicial determination of substituted judgment. … The determination of what the incompetent individual would do if competent will probe the incompetent individual's values and preferences, and such an inquiry, in a case involving antipsychotic drugs, is best made in courts of competent jurisdiction.
The Court thus decided that judges were more competent to assess Roe’s “values and preferences” than Roe’s father. If there were some evidence presented that Roe’s father was not concerned with his son’s welfare, or that the psychiatrists advising Roe's father did not know what they were doing, there might be a strong question as to whether Roe’s father should be making this decision. But the Court never identified any such reason to be concerned. At most, they discussed some of the side effects of anti-psychotic medications, compared these medicines to electroconvulsive therapy, and pointed to the past abuse and misuse of psychiatric medications as a reason why the father and psychiatrists at the state hospital should not be trusted with such a decision.
Instead, they decided that only an emergency medical decision would justify allowing the father to authorize such treatment. The psychiatrist who testified at trial pointed out that the longer Roe sat untreated, the more likely it was that his condition would become chronic. This was not enough for the Court.
We think that the possibility that the ward's schizophrenia might deteriorate into a chronic, irreversible condition at an uncertain but relatively distant date does not satisfy our definition of emergency, especially where, as here, the course of the illness is measured by years and no crisis has been precipitated.
Because Roe’s father had been given a guardianship over Roe—but no court had formally declared Roe to be incompetent—the Court refused to allow Roe’s father to make a decision on Roe’s behalf. While they acknowledged that Roe was insane (and even Roe’s attorney did not dispute this), they concluded that the Court was right to override the father’s decision because of their objectivity:Decisions such as the one the guardian wishes to make in this case pose exceedingly difficult problems for even the most capable, detached, and diligent decisionmaker. We intend no criticism of the guardian when we say that few parents could make this substituted judgment determination by its nature a self-centered determination in which the decisionmaker is called upon to ignore all but the implementation of the values and preferences of the ward when the ward, in his present condition, is living at home with other children…. A judicial determination also benefits the guardian, who otherwise might suffer from lingering doubts concerning the propriety of his decision.
The guardian, in this case, Roe’s father, doubtless thanked the justices for helping him with his “lingering doubts” by overriding his judgment, and that of the doctors, by ruling that a violent and insane person could not be treated against his will—dramatically increasing the odds that Roe’s mental illness would become chronic.
I understand that parents are too emotionally involved in the situation to be completely objective. Sometimes parents have an interest in seeing that someone doesn't get well--for example, if there's a history of abuse that the father would like to keep quiet. But this wasn't Roe's father just flipping open the Physicians Desk Reference and saying, "Gee, why don't we put our son on this drug? It sounds like it might work!" This assumption by the justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that they were better suited to make agonizing decisions than the patient's father and psychiatrists is legal arrogance at its worst.
If you don't have kids, or you have never had to make momentous decisions about the care of a child, you may not understand the anguish that a parent goes through in a case like this. If I had been Roe's father, the temptation to go punch out the arrogant idiot that wrote this decision would have been very, very strong.
UPDATE: The deeper it gets, the more apparent it is that the Massachusetts high court must have been smoking a lot of weed when they wrote this one.
The Court finally laid down six criteria for deciding how a judge should decide whether to force treatment. One of these criteria was an open invitation for judges making these decisions to ignore express statements of the patient before he became ill:If the ward has expressed a preference while not subjected to guardianship and presumably competent, … such an expression is entitled to great weight in determining his substituted judgment unless the judge finds that either: (a) simultaneously with his expression of preference the ward lacked the capacity to make such a medical treatment decision, or (b) the ward, upon reflection and reconsideration, would not act in accordance with his previously expressed preference in the changed circumstances in which he currently finds himself.
But what are a patient’s preferences? How would a judge know that the patient “would have changed his opinion after reflection or in altered circumstances.” This is worse than guessing what Saikewicz might have wanted; here, the Court here encouraged a judge to overturn a patient’s “expressed preferences … made while competent” based on what a judge decided that patient would have done.
The sixth criterion for “substituted judgment” is perhaps the most ludicrous of all:Sixth, the prognosis with treatment must be examined. The likelihood of improvement or cure enhances the likelihood that an incompetent patient would accept treatment, but it is not conclusive.
After all, a sane person might prefer insanity—you just can’t tell! Or perhaps the lawyers that wrote this opinion weren't entirely sure which was preferable.
Machine Shop Activity
I've been making some of the parts for ScopeRoller caster assemblies using a friend's thickness planer, because I can plane Delrin down to .99" +- .007" with it pretty easily. It doesn't do a spectacular job--tending to produce some waviness at the end of each piece (which I then cut into two or three parts)--but I'm using scrap Delrin that I bought for $1 a pound, so I don't much mind.
Last year, I borrowed his planer, and made what seemed like an excessive number of parts, but sure enough, they have all shipped out the door! A customer email today:The wheels for my GM-8 have arrived (i.e., the "big wheels" version). They fit perfectly and I really like them! They are both larger and stronger than I was expecting. Also, the brake lock works better than I was expecting. Thanks much; I'm very pleased.
Well, last night I tried to do it again, but in the meantime, the part that locks the blades in position had broken, so it really didn't work anymore. I considered buying a used thickness planer off Craig's List for $100, but when I stopped at Home Depot on the way home they had a Ryobi 13" thickness planer for $199. Brand new, with a warranty! I couldn't resist.
And my, does it work nicely! No waviness at all. It produces a nearly machined finish, and the height adjustment is much better than my friend's planer. Each rotation of the adjustment knob is 1/16", and there are 64 divisions on the knob, so that you can theoretically make adjustments of less than 1/1000th of an inch. In practice, because of the coarseness of the thread on the adjuster, and the somewhat approximate positioning of the blades, I don't think it is realistic to get better than 1/500th of an inch accuracy on the cut, with a tendency to leave an extra .002" to .005" in the middle of these pieces--but that's certainly good enough for what I need to do.
The lack of waviness also means that the scrap ends that I used to throw away are sufficiently uniform in size and appearance that, with a little bit of trimming, they become part for another product that ScopeRoller sells.
I've read that Ford was quite specific about the wood, quality, and finish of the crates in which subcontractors shipped engine parts to him. The reason was very simple; having removing everything from the crates, the crates were turned into Model T floorboards. Wood that wasn't good enough was shipped to some cousins, who made it into Kingsford Charcoal. (I think "Kingsford" may have been hyphenated at one time.)
Waste nothing; use everything. (If only there was a market for Delrin and UHMW polyethylene shavings.)
Another nice feature of this thickness planer is that has a 2 1/4" dust exhaust, so I can plug a shop vacuum into the end, turn the vacuum on, and as I plane the Delrin, most of the chips get sucked up by the vacuum. (Not all, but it is still less of a mess to clean up.)
The Central Machinery model 43389 16 speed floor drill press with which I have been so impressed? Last September, the on/off switch broke. I called Harbor Freight, who imports the Central Machinery brand. The switch cost me all of $1, but the shipping came to about $12. I guess that I should have bought more switches. It broke again.
The good news is that it always breaks in the on position, so I can turn it on and off by just plugging and unplugging, while I wait for parts. When they open on Monday, I think I will request three switches this time, to spread the costs of shipping over more switches.
Ubuntu 7.04 Video Drivers Irritation
If you aren't an Ubuntu Linux user, this entry will be irrelevant. For many of you, it will be, "Huh?"
The Linux box that I use for backing up all the PCs around here updated to Ubuntu release 7.04--and someone decided not to support any of the "proprietary" video drivers. So the only mode that it came up in was standard VGA--or 640x480. Yuck!
The instructions on how to fix this are to open a shell, and run this:
That will step you through the selection of the appropriate drivers for your Linux PC.
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
The Health Advantages of Islam
I mean, other than much of your male population doesn't live long enough to suffer from the diseases of old age. No, this article from Time Out London is a serious piece by leftists explaining how much better London will be when Islam takes over:Is London's future Islamic?
And it gets worse from there.
It’s the capital’s fastest growing religion, based on noble traditions and compassionate principles, yet Islam can still be tainted by mistrust and misunderstanding. Here Time Out argues that an Islamic London would be a better place.
...
Public health
On the surface, Islamic health doesn’t look good: the 2001 census showed that 24 per cent of Muslim women and 21 per cent of Muslim men suffered long-term illness and disability. But these are factors of social conditions rather than religion. In fact, Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes public hygiene and would reduce the transmission of superbugs in London’s hospitals.
Alcohol is haram, or forbidden, to Muslims. As London is above the national average for alcohol-related deaths in males, with 17.6 per 100,000 people (Camden has 31.6 per 100,000 males), turning all the city’s pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health. Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.
Bloggers all over are making fun of this piece of leftist nonsense, like Iowahawk, and David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy, and of course, Little Green Footballs. The leftists commenting over at Volokh Conspiracy, unsurprisingly, are attacking that Little Green Footballs mentioned it, rather than confronting the insanity of it.
Some People Are Too Violent to Live
This is one of those cases where as tragic as it is, I can't call this a mistake. The shooter bumped into someone on the bus, who overreacted, and got killed for his failure to recognize that it was just an accident:The deadly shooting of an unarmed man on a Metro bus two months ago was justified, a prosecutor said after a grand jury declined to indict the shooter, because the man appeared to be a threat. But the man's family said the recent decision to drop the murder charge was an "outrage."
Francis wasn't shot because he had a criminal background, but because he escalated what should have been, "Sorry" into a threat of physical violence, and was shot in self-defense.
Harris County prosecutors had charged Garrett William Mallot in the death of Otis James Francis after an altercation March 28. Assistant District Attorney Katherine McDaniel said Mallot originally was charged with murder because someone had been shot and authorities needed time to investigate.
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The Metro bus had about 30 passengers when Mallot, who had a license to carry a concealed handgun, climbed aboard shortly before noon in the 11700 block of Westheimer. As he boarded, the two men bumped into each other and began arguing. Mallot continued to the back.
McDaniel said several witnesses on the bus said Francis then walked from his seat at the front of the bus to Mallot in the back while saying he was going to beat Mallot.
"That guy said he was going to kick my ass," Mallot has said.
"He (Francis) made verbal threats, then I believe, started clinching his fists and moving in the direction of Mr. Mallot," said Mallot's attorney, Alvin Nunnery.
As Francis approached him, Mallot believed he was in "imminent danger" and pulled out a pocket knife with a 3 1/2 -inch blade, McDaniel said.
Nunnery said his client drew the knife in the hope that it would cause Francis to keep away from him, "but it had no effect at all."
Because Francis was continuing to move toward him, Mallot dropped the knife, pulled out a pistol and shot him, McDaniel said.
Francis rushed to the front of the bus, where he collapsed and died, authorities said. Mallot remained aboard, his hands raised in surrender, until Houston police officers arrived.
McDaniel agreed with Nunnery that Mallot was significantly smaller than Francis.
McDaniel cited a legal doctrine called "apparent danger" that allows the use of deadly force if a person feels he is in imminent danger and no retreat is available.
"I believe that Mr. Mallot did have a perception of apparent danger," McDaniel said. "And I believe he was reasonable in using deadly force."
Etta Francis said she didn't believe Mallot's claim that he fired out of fear for his own safety.
"How can you call something 'self-defense' when the other person didn't have a weapon at all?" Francis said.
She has been in counseling to help her deal with her son's death.
Uncovered during the investigation, McDaniel said, were complaints about Francis being involved in other bus altercations. On Tuesday she couldn't say if any resulted in criminal convictions.
Francis also had a Harris County criminal record, with past convictions for charges ranging from assault to drug offenses.
"He may have had a (criminal) background, but it didn't warrant him to be shot down like a dog," Etta Francis said.
Oh, of course, black political leaders are insisting on playing the race card:On Tuesday, community activist Quanell X called for the case to be presented to another grand jury with a new prosecutor.
Here's a clue: what's a slap in the face to the entire African-American community is that a thug like this feels that he has a right to run around threatening people. I'm sure that most of Francis's previous victims were black.
"This is a disgrace," Quanell said. "It's a slap in the face to the entire African-American community, and we have a right to be outraged."
A Rather Careless Piece of Research by the Weekly Standard
Consider two professors at the same school, both seeking tenure (at a school where 91% of those considered for tenure get it--so it isn't hard). One of the professors unfavorably compares a major document of Western civilization with Mein Kampf. The other?According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez's scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department's standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.
I quickly looked over the results of this search for Gonzalez's email address in scholar.google.com, and it does indeed seem to be the case that his many scholarly papers are often cited. (I searched by email address because there is another astronomy professor at the University of Washington with the same name, who also has a lot of published papers.)
So which one got tenure?DESPITE A STELLAR RESEARCH RECORD, Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is being forced out of his job for the expression--outside the classroom--of an inconvenient personal belief.
At first glance, this tells us something of what positions are acceptable to take outside of the classroom at Iowa State University, and which are not. This article about the subject from the Ames Tribune would also suggest that political motivations drove the decision to deny tenure:
In 2004, Gonzalez co-wrote a book called The Privileged Planet. He argued that life on earth and our ability to make scientific discoveries about the cosmos depend on a host of incredibly improbable planetary conditions--the preponderance of which suggested intelligent design rather than cosmic accident as the explanation for the universe.
Gonzalez never taught this material to students. But if he and co-author Jay Richards (a former colleague of mine) are right, then the late astronomer Carl Sagan was wrong when he mocked our human "delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe." Privileged Planet was praised on its dust jacket by senior scholars at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and England's Cambridge University.
Gonzalez was up for tenure at ISU this spring. He didn't make the cut. Which, in academia, is the equivalent of being fired (with a year's grace time to look for other work).
Normally, it is not especially difficult to attain tenure at ISU. In 2007, 91 percent of tenure applications were approved, including that of Hector Avalos, a religious-studies teacher. Avalos, was elevated to a full professorship despite wildly anti-religious statements in a 2005 book (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence) which compared the Bible unfavorably with Hitler's Mein Kampf. Avalos wrote, "Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible. . . . Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies."In the summer of 2005, three faculty members at ISU drafted a statement against the use of intelligent design in science. One of those authors, Hector Avalos, told The Tribune at the time he was concerned the growing prominence of Gonzalez's work was beginning to market ISU as an "intelligent design school."
However, this article from the Des Moines Register suggests that money is the issue:
The statement collected signatures of support from more than 120 ISU faculty members before similar statements surfaced at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.
According to ISU's policy on promotion and tenure, evaluation is based "primarily on evidence of scholarship in the faculty member's teaching, research/creative activities, and/or extension/professional practice."
In addition to that criteria, Gonzalez's department of astronomy and physics sets a benchmark for tenure candidates to author at least 15 peer-reviewed journal articles of quality. Gonzalez said he submitted 68, of which 25 have been written since he arrived at ISU in 2001.
"I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," he said. Ames, Ia. - An Iowa State University professor who advocates say was denied academic tenure because he pushed the theory of intelligent design raised significantly less research grant money than his peers who achieved tenure.
Iowa State University has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Guillermo Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez's peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure, which is basically a lifetime appointment at the university.
"Essentially, he had no research funding," said Eli Rosenberg, chairman of the physics and astronomy department where Gonzalez is employed. "That's one of the issues."
Outside grant money pays for research, which includes everything from supporting graduate students to lab equipment to travel.
It's becoming more of a factor in tenure decisions across the university, Rosenberg said.
"At all levels of the university it has gotten more intense to look at that," he said. "In order to survive doing research, (you) have to support graduate students and travel. You have to generate that money yourself."
It is not uncommon for universities to use outside grant money as a criterion in tenure decisions, particularly in the sciences, said Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors.
"The competition has become stiffer and fewer projects are being funded, and so the individuals are now being turned down to tenure because they are not able to get the funding," he said.
Advocates for Gonzalez have noted he authored more peer-reviewed papers than what his department had said was needed for someone of his rank to achieve tenure.
"The overarching and the most important thing is really my publication record," said Gonzalez, who said he's published 68 peer-reviewed papers during his career.
He pointed to ISU's physics and astronomy tenure policy, which said promotion to an associate professor requires potential to achieve a national or international reputation, a standard demonstrated by the publication of 15 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
The article from the Weekly Standard says that Avalos received tenure, but over here is the claim that Avalos did not receive tenure, but was only promoted to full professor.
I really don't know what to think. It might well be that Gonzalez's support for ID played a part in the denial of tenure, but there are other possible explanations as well, and I'm not too impressed with the level of research that this Weekly Standard article shows.
UPDATE: A reader with connections to the professional astronomers tells me that the Gonzalez at University of Washington and Iowa State University are the same guy, and as you might well expect, this guy is a superstar among professional astronomers--which makes anti-Christian bias an even more likely explanation for the refusal to give him tenure.
About What I Would Expect in The New York Review of Books
There's a review by Pankaj Mishra of The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum. I don't claim to have any expertise in Indian history, but I can tell a dishonest representation when a review tries to put the blame for the Hindu/Muslim rioting on the recent growth in power of "right-wing Hindu extremists" who are also generally more laissez-faire than the Indian tradition.
Something like 500,000 people died in the intercommunal rioting that accompanied independence and partition into Pakistan and India. One of my wife's professors, an Indian, vividly recalls having to walk through endless rows of bodies to try and find the remains of family members after those riots. The net result of partition was what became the Hindu-dominated, but relatively tolerant state of India, and the Muslim-dominated state of Pakistan (still West and East Pakistan).
Significantly, the Pakistani civil war that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh involved entirely Muslims killing and raping Muslims. Everywhere in the world where you find Muslims in large numbers, you find nauseatingly brutal violence, and it doesn't matter if this is Muslims vs. Hindus (in India), or Muslims vs. Christians (in Indonesia, East Timor, Russia, the Western world, southern Sudan), or Muslims vs. Muslims (Darfur, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia), or Muslims vs. animists (southern Sudan). I can't claim to have any enthusiasm for the Hindu nationalists, who do seem quite willing to respond to Muslim atrocities in kind, but the common factor in terrorism everywhere in the world turns out to be Islam. Even the IRA, in spite of having its origins in a Catholic vs. Protestant struggle, was funded for a number of years by a Muslim crazy--Mommamar Khadaffi.
Of course, this review tries to turn the entire struggle inside India into something that can be blamed on the U.S.:Gujarat's pro-business chief minister, Narendra Modi, an important leader of the BJP, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. The police were explicitly ordered not to stop the violence. The prime minister of India at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seemed to condone the killings when he declared that "wherever Muslims are, they don't want to live in peace." In public statements Hindu nationalists tried to make their campaign against Muslims seem part of the US-led war on terror, and, as Nussbaum writes, "the current world atmosphere, and especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, have made it easier for them to use this ploy."
Vajpayee is making a statement of fact: large numbers of Muslims are not prepared to live in peace, because the Islamist factions assert that any society that is not Muslim is contrary to God's will, and they are prepared to use whatever levels of brutality are necessary to achieve a Muslim society.Her interviews with prominent right-wing Hindus yield some shrewd psychological insights, particularly into Arun Shourie, an economist and investigative journalist who, famous initially for his intrepid exposés of corruption, became a cabinet minister and close adviser to BJP prime minister Vajpayee. She suggests that the anti-Muslim views of Shourie, who is otherwise capable of intelligent commentary, may owe to "something volatile and emotionally violent in his character...something that lashes out at a perceived threat and refuses to take seriously the evidence that it might not be a threat."
Gee, why would anyone think that Islam might be a threat to a peaceful India? Even as the dead are still being counted in India's worst terrorist attack in more than a decade, suspicion has already fallen on Islamic terrorists — though not al-Qaeda. India is home to a Muslim insurgency in Kashmir, and earlier in the day militants killed eight people and injured 30 in five separate bomb attacks in the capital, Srinagar. And while no one said those same insurgents carried out Tuesday's rush-hour train attacks in Bombay — which police said killed at least 130 people and injured 260 — security sources told TIME they suspected a shadowy alliance of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) working with indigenous Indian Muslims from the banned Student Islamic Movemement of India (SIMI).
I really, really want to believe that Islam can live in peace with other religions. But so far, the evidence is lacking. I've worked with Muslims who were decent and peaceful people, and I am prepared to believe that a majority of Muslims in the U.S. are in that category. But what does it tell you when a survey of American Muslims finds that 8% believe that suicide bombing can be justified "Often/sometimes," 5% have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and only 40% believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks? (Although to be fair, I'm not sure that the numbers would be much different if the survey took place at a faculty meeting in many American universities.)
SIMI detonated a total of nine bombs in Bombay during the course of 2003, killing close to 80 people and injuring hundreds more. The same loose grouping of Islamic radicals are also suspected of being behind a series of attacks in India in the last year that included three blasts in New Delhi last October that killed 60 and three more in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi in March this year, which killed 20, as well as smaller attacks in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
When You Can't Tell Real News From Parody...
It's not good. The latest problem blamed on global warming? Full cat shelters:KANSAS CITY, Mo. (June 6, 2007) — These days cats outnumber dogs by 13.5 million and that number is growing. Today more than ever, animal shelters across the United States are reporting sky-rocketing influxes of cats and kittens being brought into their agencies. Many believe global warming is extending cat breeding seasons and causing the cat population to swell.
Wait a minute. The temperature increase is something under a degree. And she wants us to believe that this is enough to explain a dramatic increase in cats?
According to Kathy Warnick, president of Pets Across America — the largest umbrella organization for animal shelters serving more than 130 million people, global warming is thought to be a contributing factor to the dramatic increase of stray, owned, and feral cats.
“Cats are typically warm-weather, spring-time breeders,” reminds Warnick, who also serves as president of the Humane Society of Missouri. “However, states that typically experience primarily longer and colder winters are now seeing shorter, warmer winters, leading to year-round breeding.
Basically, there is no longer a reproduction lull with cat breeding cycles and unfortunately, it seems more people are bringing boxes of kittens into our agencies during winter now.”
I've noticed a dramatic increase in spoiled rich kids with no self-control (Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan, Brittany Spears) over the last few years. Maybe global warming is causing more bad parents to be naked, thus causing more reproduction.
Alaska Cruise: Skagway
Skagway was as far north as our cruise went--59 degrees 27 minutes north latitude, according to my GPS which fortunately matches the government's belief about where it is. (That's one of the nice things about facts based on universal, repeatable concepts. Imagine trying to find your way to Skagway if everyone's concept of reality was considered equally valid--and they didn't match.) What this meant was when we left that evening, even at 11:30 PM, there was still a considerable glow in the sky from the Sun--which was just below the horizon.
Here's the inlet from the ocean.
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And here is the back of some gorgeous redhead (my wife), admiring the quite steep cliffs of the fjord (for that is what it is). This gives you an idea of how steep the mountains are at Skagway.
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Here is most of Skagway--which shrinks down to about 160 people in winter.
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We were at first a little put off by the graffiti on the side of the mountain where our ship docked, even though one piece was guite artistic.
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There was an explanation of it on an historical plaque:
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Skagway is even more of a tourist destination than Ketchikan:
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The place has some history to it. This was the disembarkation point for the Yukon prospectors who went up and over Chilkoot Pass, on what became known as the Golden Staircase--which you have probably seen pictures of, such as this one. (There's a history of the Golden Staircase, and the human costs associated with it, here.) Unfortunately, the Golden Staircase was 14 miles up another valley, and not really accessible by car in the time that we had.
They had this rather odd front end on a locomotive in the center of town that at first I thought might have been used for drilling tunnels--but it was too small to allow the train to pass through.
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It turns out to be a snow plow.
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We signed up for a Gardens of Skagway tour, which wasn't expensive, nor a particularly investment of our time. The bus driver was the only redeeming virtue, since he was able to give us a bit of a history of the town, and a description of what it is like to live there during the tourist season. The town effectively shuts down for the winter, and only a hardy few artist sorts stay there. Skagway is very expensive--housing is scarce, and during the tourist season, many of the seasonal workers live in tents. Everything has to be brought in by barge, and so I paid $1.79 for a 20 ounce bottle of Coke. There is no doctor there; one flies in once a month to see patients.
Unlike Juneau, which has no road access to the outside world, Skagway does--but our driver explained that if you take the auto ferry to Haines, which is 14 miles away, you pay $80. You can drive to Haines--but it is 370 miles. The nearest real shopping is in the Yukon Territory, Canada.
I think we might have done better taking one of the other tours. A friend on the trip elected to take the narrow gauge railroad to Whitehorse, Yukon, and reported that it was very scenic. We found out that because of glacial isostasy (although the driver didn't use that term--nor probably knew what it was), this area is rising about one inch per century, as are a number of other places where the glaciers have been receding for many centuries. Our driver told us the railroad floats on the surface of the ground, rather than nailed down to the ties. Apparently many buildings in Skagway are similarly loosely attached to the ground, just to avoid flexure of foundations.
Here's one tour that I wish that I had known about in advance--we might have signed up for it.
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This is supposedly the most photographed building in Alaska--interesting because of the vast number of pieces of driftwood that make up the facade:
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The garden tour turned out to include a sculpture garden. It was all well known bronze work, some of it highly realistic, some of it a bit more impressionistic.
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For a place this cold and far north, the plants and flowers are astonishingly vibrant in their colors.
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This spruce tree with red tips is called, surprisingly enough, a red-tipped spruce.
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The hippie sort leading the tour tells us that the red tips are very rich in vitamin C. My son-in-law gave them a try, and reported that they were citrusy tasting.
Of course, behind everything in Skagway is the ever-present reminders that the glaciers aren't far away.
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Alaska Trip: The Mendenhall Glacier & Juneau
Juneau (named for Joe Juneau, one of the two gold miners who first set up shop in the area) is the state capital of Alaska--and must be about the smallest state capital that I have ever visited. I remember that some years back, there was talk of moving the state capital up towards the center of the state, on the grounds that the shortage of buildable land around Juneau made it impossible for the state government to grow. The Libertarian Party members of the state legislature essentially said, "Wait, that's a feature of Juneau, not a bug!" There is no access by car to Juneau--you can only get there by ship or airplane.
The big industries are government, tourism, and the Alaskan Brewing Company. I drink perhaps an ounce of alcohol in a year (generally wine or champagne), and never beer. (I hate the smell and the taste of it.) But not everyone on this trip has the same view of the foul-smelling liquid that I do, so we went on the tour.
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They have a bottle of as many of their competitors as they can obtain, from many states, and many countries. As you might expect, Germany is a very long shelf, and it is only because most German beers are apparently not bottled, but only in kegs, that it isn't longer. One of the more amusingly cheeky collections are from Utah brewers. You may have heard of Polygamy Porter (their slogan, "Why have only one?") but I was unfamiliar with St. Provo Girl, parodying the St. Pauli Girl beer label. (The light wasn't great, and a flash didn't help, sorry about the blur--pretend you have been sampling the local product for a while):
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There are also some amusingly labeled beers from California, such as the Lobotomy Bock in the center of the top shelf.
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By the way: they give you a chance to sample every beer they make, all eight of them--no charge. By the way, one little surprise: most (all?) states have laws that either prohibit supplying alcohol to minors, or prohibit anyone but parents supplying alcohol to someone under 21. Alaska law makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to supply alcohol to someone under 21. I would suspect that at least part of the reason for this very severe punishment is that Alaska has a lot of Indian villages where alcohol has long been a serious social problem. A number of villages completely ban alcohol as a result.
The bottling plant was operational when we arrived, but it had shut down by the time we were done. I took this picture to show you the CDs that they apparently play while bottling beer--and primarily because a friend of my was one of the producers of the documentary Standing in the Shadow of Motown:
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Anyway, we went to visit the Mendenhall Glacier. As someone (maybe with the Park Service) explained it to me, this isn't the biggest glacier in Alaska, or even in this area. It just happens to be the most accessible by car in the area, so it is the tourist glacier.
None of the pictures that I have taken really captures the majesty of Alaska, and this set of pictures is even more inadequate to really get how beautiful and vast of a place that it is. The name "Alaska" is reputedly from the Aleut words for "The Great Land," and it really is.
There were bald eagles everywhere--but generally too far away for me to get a decent shot.
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Here are some shots of the Mendenhall Glacier from various distances--and this should give you an idea of how big this is.
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On the right (south) side of the glacier there was a waterfall--but until you get close--and notice the scale of the people below it--you don't really get the size.
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This was a mildly challenging rock climb to get to--not really difficult, but enough of a struggle to impress our kids that Mom and Dad weren't too old and decrepit to attempt it.
The underlying rock is granite with big, beautiful quartz intrusions in it. If you are a gold miner (like Joe Juneau was), they are especially beautiful! If you see quartz veins in granite, a gold miner could do worse.
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This not terribly impressive building (photographed through a foggy bus window) is the current Capitol building--a leftover federal building that was never replaced with something more grand while they were arguing about whether to move the state capital out of Juneau or not.
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Anti-Gun Political Activist Arrested...For Unlawful Gun Sales
Classical Values pointed me to this utterly unsurprising article in LA Weekly:FEDERAL ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS AGENTS knocked first, then entered the Downey home of purported anti-gang activist Hector Marroquin on Wednesday, arresting him for selling silencers and weapons — including three assault rifles and a machine gun — to an undercover ATF agent.
You might think this government funded gun control group is just an example of an opportunistic criminal looking for an easier way to get money than criminal activity, but I think it is a bit worse than that:
The gun sales, some of which Marroquin, the founder of the gang-intervention group No Guns, transacted at his bar in the city of Cudahy, were captured on videotape and audiotape, said police officers present at his arrest.
Inside the house, the 51-year-old veteran of the 18th Street Gang surrendered as his daughter’s boyfriend, David Jimenez, a parolee at large, jumped out a window, tossed a gun into the backyard pool and climbed on the roof, authorities said. Officials said ATF agents then confronted him, he climbed back inside and was arrested and charged as a felon in possession of a gun.
Marroquin, an alleged associate of the prison-based Mexican Mafia, has grown accustomed to such intrusions, having been arrested many times over the years while at the same time being the founder and CEO of No Guns, which has received $1.5 million from Los Angeles City Hall via the much-criticized L.A. Bridges program designed by the Los Angeles City Council to keep youth out of gangs.
Last December, the L.A. Weekly exposed Marroquin’s allegedly persistent gang ties and suspected mafia association, in its “Broken Bridges” article, based on federal Drug Enforcement Agency memos, classified L.A. County Sheriff’s Department documents, wiretap transcripts and interviews with current and former law enforcers.
Since then, John Chavez, the head of L.A. Bridges, which funded No Guns through the Community Development Department, has lost his job.
On Wednesday, the L.A. District Attorney’s Office filed five charges related to Marroquin’s sale of automatic weapons and silencers to the undercover ATF agent, according to a criminal complaint filed in L.A. Superior Court. Also charged was Marroquin’s girlfriend, Sylvia Arellano, who police arrested the same day in Cudahy. Police searched Marroquin’s bar on Atlantic Avenue in Cudahy, as well as an auto yard in South Gate, where they recovered gang photos and journals.At the time of his arrest Marroquin faced a separate gun possession charge, also reported in December by the Weekly. That trial has been delayed. Meanwhile, his son, Hector Marroquin Jr., a former No Guns officer who police say is an admitted 18th Street Gang member, has been indicted on charges of home invasion robbery and faces up to 40 years in prison.
Oh yes, it isn't just one bad apple:No Guns finally lost its funding last year, after city officials found the organization had engaged in nepotism and misappropriation of public funds. Along with his wife, son and daughter, who police say is a member of the Hawthorne L’il Watts Gang, the Marroquins made more than $200,000 a year in salaries — public funds paid by L.A. taxpayers — to steer children away from gangs and help active gangsters escape the life.
This isn't the first time that an anti-gun activist has demonstrated that their ideology is primarily a matter of projection:
However, a report by civil rights lawyer Connie Rice and independent audits have stated that L.A. Bridges, which has funneled more than $100 million to programs like No Guns, cannot show that it has reduced gang activity, and the city council lacks any meaningful measures for determining success. Just last week, another purported gang-member-turned-good, 30-year-old Mario Corona, with a group called Communities in Schools, also a recipient of L.A. Bridges money, was sentenced to 32 months in prison for transporting a large amount of methamphetamine and being a felon with a gun.A bereaved mother whose son was shot and killed nearly two years ago -- and who spoke out against gun violence and memorialized shooting victims at the "Million Mom March" rally in Washington, D.C., last Mother's Day -- was herself convicted of shooting a man she wrongly believed was her son's killer.
And this anti-gun activist, who wants pro-gun legislators killed:
Barbara Graham, the Washington Post reported Thursday, "was found guilty in D.C. Superior Court … of trying to avenge her son's death by shooting a young man" last year that "she blamed for the killing."
Graham, who lost her own son in 1999 in a shooting death at a Martin Luther King, Jr. rally, became active in a Washington-area group, "Mothers on the Move Spiritually," in the months following her son's death. The group helped sponsor the MMM event, where Graham "spoke out … and helped memorialize the dead," the paper said.
The Million Moms March, which becomes nine months old as an organization Feb. 14, has become one of the nation's leading advocates of stringent gun control. The group, which promotes gun-control activism among the nation's mothers, says it is "dedicated to preventing gun death and injury and supporting victims and survivors of gun trauma."
(CNSNews.com) - An Illinois gun-rights group says it plans to complain to the Catholic Church after a Chicago priest at the weekend appeared to call for the murder of a suburban gun shop owner.
There are people that should not own guns, no question about it. And they are often those screeching most loudly that no one should have them.
During a Rainbow/PUSH Coalition protest at Chuck's Gun Shop & Range on Saturday, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina's Church, threatened to "snuff" shop owner John Riggio.
The Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) has posted online what is says is a recording of Pfleger's remarks.
PflegerIn the audio clip, the priest is heard being introduced to the crowd by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Immediately therafter, Pfleger launches into a tirade.
"I want the NRA [National Rifle Association] to understand - you have a lot of money, but money can't buy moral authority and it can't buy justice or freedom, and we will fight you, NRA," he says.
"We will fight you on every angle [sic], no matter how much money you've got, we will embarrass you, and we will embarrass every legislator that takes money from you. We will call them out by name, by district. We will expose you, legislators."
Pfleger then turns his attention to Riggio. "He's the owner of Chuck's. John Riggio. R-i-g-g-i-o. We're going to find you and snuff you out … you know you're going to hide like a rat. You're going to hide but like a rat we're going to catch you and pull you out. We are not going to allow you to continue to hide when we're here …"
"We're going to keep coming back, and like Reverend Jackson says, it takes civil disobedience, if it takes whatever it takes … we're going to snuff out John Riggio, we're going to snuff out legislators that are voting … and we are coming for you because we are not going to sit idly. Keep on fighting, people. Keep on fighting, keep on fighting."
UPDATE: David Codrea points out that along with advocating assassination for holding the "wrong" positions, this priest has a long history of using his church for partisan political purposes. I'm not keen on the IRS bullying churches into silence by threatening to pull their tax-exempt status--but I would like this to be a consistent position. Either they do this for all churches, or for none. Right now, black churches are allowed to pull stunts like Father Pfleger does--but churches that lean towards the right end of the political spectrum are not.
One of Codrea's readers contacted Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and asked them to take on Pfleger's church concerning this. I am very skeptical that anything will happens, since Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is a liberal group, and therefore not committed to integrity or honesty.
The Idaho Sex Offender Registry Has Some Address Errors
Let me explain: I live in Boise County. The City of Boise is in Ada County, just south of us. The Idaho Sex Offender Registry lets you look up registered sex offenders by name, zip code, or county. I have discovered that of the 17 registered sex offenders who are listed as being in Boise County, ten have Boise City addresses, which both overstates the number of these creeps we have in our county, and might cause a person who is looking in Ada County to miss one of these creeps next door. Some of them are characters that you would want to know about, if you had kids and lived in the neighborhood--like this guy who was convicted at 48 of sexual abuse of a child under 16 or this guy, convicted at age 52 of lewd conduct with a child under 16.
UPDATE: Dawn Peck of the Idaho Bureau of Criminal Identification tells me that these ten people are living in Boise County--they just still have Boise City mailing addresses. Charming.
Humor
A reader informs of an amazing new exercise program:Begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side. With a 5-lb potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax.
Each day, you'll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer. After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-lb potato sacks. Then try 50-lb potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100-lb potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute. (I'm at this level)
After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each of the sacks.
This Would Almost Be Funny...
Except that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's bizarre sentence below (starting with "In short") was written to justify letting someone die because it was impossible to know what the person wanted:On April 26, 1976, William E. Jones, superintendent of the Belchertown State School (a facility of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health), and Paul R. Rogers, a staff attorney at the school, petitioned the Probate Court for Hampshire County for the appointment of a guardian of Joseph Saikewicz, a resident of the State school. Simultaneously they filed a motion for the immediate appointment of a guardian ad litem, with authority to make the necessary decisions concerning the care and treatment of Saikewicz, who was suffering with acute myeloblastic monocytic leukemia. The petition alleged that Saikewicz was a mentally retarded person in urgent need of medical treatment and that he was a person with disability incapable of giving informed consent for such treatment.
In short, this guy can't clearly state what he wants or doesn't want, has never done so, has no legal guardian, until this question came up, and most people would choose to live--so the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered him to not be treated. He died three months later of pneumonia, as a result of leukemia.
...
Drawing on the evidence before him including the testimony of the medical experts, and the report of the guardian ad litem, the probate judge issued detailed findings with regard to the costs and benefits of allowing Saikewicz to undergo chemotherapy. The judge's findings are reproduced in part here because of the importance of clearly delimiting the issues presented in this case. The judge below found:
"1. That the majority of persons suffering from leukemia who are faced with a choice of receiving or foregoing such chemotherapy, and who are able to make an informed judgment thereon, choose to receive treatment in spite of its toxic side effects and risks of failure.
...
In short, the decision in cases such as this should be that which would be made by the incompetent person, if that person were competent, but taking into account the present and future incompetency of the individual as one of the factors which would necessarily enter into the decision-making process of the competent person. Having recognized the right of a competent person to make for himself the same decision as the court made in this case, the question is, do the facts on the record support the proposition that Saikewicz himself would have made the decision under the standard set forth. We believe they do. [SUPERINTENDENT OF BELCHERTOWN STATE SCHOOL v. SAIKEWICZ, 370 N.E.2d 417, 373 Mass. 728 (1977)]
If Saikewicz had been able to express an opinion as to whether he wanted to live or die, that would be one thing. If he had been competent to make that decision at an earlier time, and had told someone (even just casually), "I would rather die than go through chemotherapy," I could live with that. If the Court believed that most people facing a similar situation would be inclined to die a relatively quick and painless death rather than suffer the consequences of chemotherapy, I suppose that I would only be griping about them making a decision based on what "most people" wanted. But they had absolutely nothing but their own decision of what an incompetent person would have wanted if he had been competent but he was taking into account that he was incompetent.
Like I said at the beginning--it would almost be funny, if it didn't read like a Marx Brothers version of the Nazis T4 program.
And in case you are wondering: I'm reading this case because this is one of the "substituted judgment" cases that plays a part in the right of mental patients to refuse treatment.
What's The Most Effective Way to Deflate Anti-Gun Hysteria?
Take someone shooting. My experience is that most people who are hostile to guns realize, after they have had a chance to fire one, that they don't cause bad thoughts to go into your head--and they also realize that being able to defend yourself is empowering. This article by a gay liberal Ohioan really captures it well:In a nondescript business complex off Interstate 77 in Broadview Heights, across the street from Radio Disney and a block away from a daycare, I've got my hands wrapped around a piece, finger on the trigger. When I awoke this morning, my irrational anxieties led me to dress as heterosexually as possible. After all, what do you wear to your first time at the range? I've chosen jeans, an orange ringer T and a green zip-up sweatshirt, a combination seemingly straight enough to pull off this charade.
It is well worth reading.
To my right, in the next stall, a weapon fires powerfully, a sound that pierces through both my headphones and earplugs. I have no idea if the comically small revolver I'm gripping will create the same blast, but I'm about to find out. With my feet spread wide and arms rigidly stretched forward, I — a show tune-loving, Democrat-voting homosexual — am mere seconds from pulling the trigger on this instrument of death, something I vowed I would never do.
Yet here I am. The gun's hammer is cocked back, my eyes are fixed on the target downrange, instructor Jim is standing expectantly over my left shoulder, and the time has come for me to fire this .22.
How the hell did I get here?
What Are "Registered Sex Offender" Crimes in Idaho?
I got into a bit of an argument with someone about this recently, who claimed that any rape, even statutory rape (example: a 19 year old having sex with a 16 year old) makes one a registered sex offender. I didn't think that was right; it certainly isn't the case in California. So what is Idaho law on this?
A little background. Idaho adopted a requirement for certain convicted felons to register as sex offenders starting in 1993, and revised it in 1998. The Idaho State Police have a detailed list of the offenses that require you to register as a sex offender. In brief:
This only applies to adults. Juveniles convicted under any of these sections automatically drop out of the registered sex offender requirement at age 21, unless the prosecutor petitions the court based on the juvenile remaining a public safety hazard.
It is certainly possible that a 19 year old who has sex with a 16 year old could be convicted under the statutory rape charge, and become a registered sex offender for life. So often is that the case (the Romeo-and-Juliet scenario)? I searched the Idaho Central Sex Offender Registry for my current zip code 83629, and not surprisingly, there were only two offenders.
The first guy was born in 1945:CRIM SEX CONTACT OF MNR 2 CNTS COCHISE CO AZ 19850109 CHILD MOLESTATION 2 CNTS COCHISE CO AZ 19850109 ATMPT CRIM SEX CONT OF MIN 2CT GRANT CO NM 19900921 CRIM SEX CONT OF MINOR GRANT CO NM 19900921
I'm not sure what exactly the Arizona and New Mexico statutes include, but he seems to be a slow learner. The first convictions were when he was almost forty, and even if "CHILD MOLESTATION" meant something bizarre like a 17 year old, this is way out of "Romeo and Juliet" territory.
The other guy was born in 1962, and his conviction is recent:ENTICING CHILD OVER INTERNET CANYON CO ID 20070319
So I then moved on to my old zipcode in Boise, 83713, to see if there were a lot of cases where a kid just over the line was convicted of statutory rape with a kid just under the line. There are 24 people listed in that zipcode.
1. Born in 1961:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 ADA CO ID 19850131 SEX ABUSE OF CHLD U/16 YRS ADA CO ID 19850628
He was convicted when he was 24, with a child under 16.
2. Born in 1979:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 ADA CO ID 20040402
He was convicted when he was 25, with a child under 16.
3. Born 1983:ENTICING CHLD OVER INTERNET ADA CO ID 20070126
Convicted at age 24.
4. Born in 1940:POSSESSION OF CHLD PORNOGRAPHY USM BOISE ID 20050613
5. Born in 1949:POSS SEX EXPLOIT MAT OF MINOR ADA CO ID 20061109
6. Born in 1979:RAPE,STATUTORY ADA CO ID 20000515
So he was convicted at age 21--just barely possible that he was a 19 year old with a girl under 18.
7. Born in 1974:SEX ABUSE 1ST DEG 2 CNTS CLACKAMAS CO OR 19960618
He was 25 at the time of conviction, and this crime (ORS 163.427) involves either an under 14 year old, mentally deficient, force, or causes an under 18 year old to have sexual contact with an animal.
8. Born in 1965:SEX ABUSE OF CHLD U/16 YRS ADA CO ID 19940411
So he was 29 with a child under 16.
9. Born in 1982:SEX ABUSE 3RD DEGREE JACKSON CO OR 20021115
According to Oregon Revised Statutes sec. 163.415, this could be a consensual sexual contact short of intercourse with an under 18--or it might be such contact that was non-consensual with an adult or minor. This conviction was when he was 20.
10. Born in 1950:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 ADA CO ID 19900829
A 40 year old with a child under 16.
11. Born in 1961:LEWDNESS INVOLVING A CHLD-2CTS UTAH CO UT 20001215
Whatever that Utah statute is, he was 39.
12. Born in 1964:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 ADA CO ID 19991013
So he was 35--with a child under 16.
13. Born in 1975:SEX BATT OF MINOR AGE 16/17 VALLEY CO ID 20010831
Convicted of sex with a 16 or 17 year old when he was 26.
14. Born in 1949:SEX ABUSE OF CHILD U/16 YRS ADA CO ID 19880929
Convicted when he was 39, and the child was less than 16.
15. Born in 1967:SEXUAL ABUSE 1ST DEG MULTNOMAH CO OR 19930310
Convicted when he was 26.
16. Born in 1968:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 CASSIA CO ID 19970314
Convicted when he was 29 with a child under 16.
17. Born in 1952:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 ADA CO ID 20010810
Convicted when he was 49, with a child under 16.
18. Born in 1941:RAPE BY FORCE VENTURA CO CA 19621004
Convicted when he was 21.
19. Born in 1945:LEWD COND W/MINOR CHLD U/16 TWIN FALLS CO ID 19860428
Convicted when he was 41, with an under 16.
20. Born in 1951:LEWD CONDUCT W/MINOR CHLD U/16 PAYETTE CO ID 19851121
Convicted when he was 34 with an under 16.
21. Born in 1934:SODOMY W/PERSON U/14YRS OLD MARTINEZ CO CA 19920410
Convicted when he was 58, for sex with someone under 14. (Martinez is the county seat of Contra Costa County, by the way.)
22. Born in 1971:LEWD COND W/CHLD U/16 2 CNTS ELMORE CO ID 19930520
Convicted when he was 22, with a child under 16.
23. Born in 1959:LEWD & LACIVIOUS ADA CO ID 19870101
Convicted when he was 28--presumably with a child under 16.
24. Born in 1954:POSS SEX EXPLOIT MAT OF MINOR ADA CO ID 19981228
A child porn charge.
Of the 26 examples above, we have two that might be the Romeo and Juliet situations (numbers 6 and 9 above)--at least the ages of the convictions make it possible, but by no means certain. Perhaps Idaho registered sex offender roles are crowded with lots of people who aren't really horrible creeps--but from examining these two zipcodes, I don't see the evidence. We have 24 out of 26 who were convicted as adults of having sex with kids that were ten to thirty years younger than them, or for possession of child porn, or enticing children over the Internet, and in one case, forcible rape. I'm not losing any sleep over this anymore.
Horseshoe Bend Weather
We must have brought this back from Alaska--it has been raining off and on since yesterday.
Alaska Cruise: Tracy Arm, Fjords, Glaciers, and Global Warming
The morning after Ketchikan we were supposed to be traveling through Tracy Arm, a fjord in Alaska. I had heard that it was spectacular, so I got up early--and then went and woke up the rest of my party. Wow! These pictures just don't do it justice.
Another passenger who has seen Norwegian fjords says that Tracy Arm is actually more impressive--steeper cliffs, and deeper water. Fjords are the result of glaciers scraping through a valley during the last Ice Age, when ocean levels were typically 300-350 feet lower than today (all the water was locked up in glaciers), and so when the ocean levels rose, those glacier-filled valleys became steep inlets of the ocean.
In many cases, we had frozen streams all the way down to the water.
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In other cases, the streams were still flowing. (Contrast problems, combined with subdued lighting from cloud cover, impair the quality of some pictures--sorry.)
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There were miniature icebergs everywhere, some white, some blue, depending on the number of air bubbles contained in the ice. I didn't see any calving off of glaciers, but perhaps I should have been up earlier.
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And some of these were genuine glaciers, down to sea level!
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There were hanging valleys, too, which are what happens when glaciers gouge out a tributary valley more slowly than the main glacier gouges out the main valley.
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The naturalist onboard gave a very well done presentation over the loudspeakers about the geology of Tracy Arm--and I was both pleased and surprised to hear him explain that the relationship of human activity to the shrinkage of these glaciers remains a controversial point among glaciologists. Regular readers of my blog won't find this surprising--I'm sure it surprised many of the passengers.
Where Tracy Arm meets the Pacific Ocean is a terminal moraine. Terminal moraines are where a glacier deposits rock and gravel at its end. The naturalist explained that the glacier extended up to this terminal moraine as recently as 400 years ago--meaning that whatever is causing the glacier to recede is a bit older than the Industrial Revolution.
Shocking: I Gained No Weight On The Cruise
I expected to come back, get on the scale, and be reduced to eating nothing but celery sticks for weeks, because there was so much food, and it was so good. But I guess all the walking, both onboard and onshore, did the trick. I didn't gain a pound. Neither did my wife.
Alaska -- Ketchikan
I didn't get many pictures of the wildlife, but that was more a matter of being too slow on the shutter button or not having a long enough zoom lens--not a shortage of wildlife. (I have this 28-200mm zoom lens which worked well, but there were others on the ship with zoom lenses so big that my son-in-law wisecracked that some of these people looked like they were overcompensating for other deficiencies.)
I lost count of the number of whales that we saw spouting or breaking through the surface, all during the voyage.
Bald eagles? I've seen them near our house here, but they were everywhere in Alaska on this journey. This one was a bit too backlit, but you can still tell what it is:
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This is Ketchikan, Alaska, our first stop:
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Like the rest of the Alaska coast, the vast quantity of rain and snow means that everything is very lush, like these rhododendrons:
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Here we are on the stream that runs through the historic section of Ketchikan:
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Is there anything that better typifies the wild allure of Alaska than floatplanes?
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One aspect of Ketchikan and Skagway that was not appealing was that both cities were essentially cruise ship tourist traps. Ketchikan has some commerce other than tourists, but Skagway seems to have none. In both places, jewelry stores, largely stocking the same low quality Chinese made jewelery, were dominant:
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We knew that the cruise ships steer customers towards those stores that have paid a promotional fee. One taxicab driver in Juneau told us that the stores are actually owned by the cruise ship lines. I don't know if that is true or not, but it might explain how they manage to make money charging so little for seven nights on board. It was apparent that many of our fellow passengers (like many Americans in general) have far more money than sense, and were spending it pretty wildly in these jewelery stores.
In Ketchikan, the cruise ships were stacked up in the harbor.
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As a result, there wasn't enough room at the dock (or perhaps our ship drew too much water to get there), and we ended up getting ashore in tenders that actually turned out to be the lifeboats from the ship.
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My image of a lifeboat is the open rowboats from every movie ever made about the Titanic, but these were double screw closed boats, with seating for 150.
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Idaho, the Environmentalist's State?
From Sunday's Idaho Statesman:Idaho is at the bottom of the list of states for carbon dioxide emissions — only this time last is good.
Our low carbon footprint is because of hydroelectricity--so I would hope the environmentalists would stop their campaign to breach the dams that make all that electricity.
Idahoans account for less than 23,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually, according to an Associated Press analysis released today.
The state's leadership in low emissions of the major greenhouse gas scientists blame for global warming is tied to power production. Idaho relies more than any other state on nonpolluting hydroelectric power.
The AP analysis is based on Department of Energy numbers from 2003. The review shows startling differences in states' contribution to climate change.
The biggest reason? The burning of high-carbon coal to produce cheap electricity.
• Wyoming's coal-fired power plants produce more carbon dioxide in just eight hours than the power generators of morepopulous Vermont do in a year.
• Texas, the leader in emitting this greenhouse gas, cranks out more than the next two biggest producers combined, California and Pennsylvania, which together have twice Texas' population.
• In sparsely populated Alaska, the carbon dioxide produced per person by all the flying and driving is six times the per capita amount generated by travelers in New York state.
Of course, Democrats and other environmentalists are doing their best to stop wind turbine generation of electricity as well:The wind-energy industry is objecting to federal legislation that seeks to protect birds and bats from wind turbines, arguing the measure would place unnecessary burdens on clean-energy projects.
Simon over at Classical Values points out that the claimed reason--protecting birds--makes no sense:
The Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act, a wide-ranging energy bill introduced this month, would create new standards for the placement and construction of turbines and mandate post-construction monitoring of their effects on wildlife.
...
The legislation, introduced by Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, calls for development of the regulations within six months of passage of the bill. But wind energy industry officials say they are skeptical that federal regulators will move that quickly.
Supporters of the bill said careful regulation is important with a relatively new industry.
"I think, from our perspective, setting reasonable federal standards for the development of new energy resources makes sense," said Charles Vinick, president and chief executive officer of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the chief opponent of the Cape Wind proposal.
Human-caused bird deaths
Oh yes, Ted Kennedy is part of the campaign to block wind power.
Domestic cats: Hundreds of millions a year
* Striking high-tension lines: 130 million - 1 billion a year
* Striking buildings: 97 million to 976 million a year
* Cars: 80 million a year
* Toxic chemicals: 72 million
* Striking communications towers: 4 to 50 million a year
* Wind turbines: 20,000 to 37,000
Source: National Research Council
UPDATE: A reader points out:As a former Vermonter I feel compelled to point out a few things.
1) Vermont has a nuclear power plant that produces much of its power.
2) The bulk of the rest of the power for Vermont is hydroelectric power coming from Quebec at exorbitant rates.
3) Vermont has extremely high energy costs to promote conservation.
So while Wyoming is a net exporter of power, Vermont is a net importer of power and other than the nuclear plant has effectively no power generation (there are a few very small hydroelectric plants, but many of those are being torn down to "save the fish.") And the rates there have a very strong dampening effect on businesses; right now I'm paying much less than half what I did in Vermont 6 years ago even in the heavily taxed and regulated state of Minnesota.
Eharmony Being Sued
You have probably seen the ads emphasizing that they match you up based on shared values, not just shared interests, with the grandfatherly looking guy, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, who runs the operation. Homosexuals are suing because Eharmony doesn't provide service for them:A Northern California woman sued the online dating service eHarmony on Thursday, alleging it discriminates against gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
As David Bernstein over at Volokh Conspiracy points out:
Linda Carlson said she tried to use the Internet site in February but could not based on her sexual orientation. When Carlson wrote to eHarmony to complain, the company refused to change its policy, according to the lawsuit filed on her behalf in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The lawsuit claims that by only offering to find a compatible match for men seeking women or women seeking men, the company was violating state law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
"Such outright discrimination is hurtful and disappointing for a business open to the public in this day and age," Carlson said in a statement.
The suit names Pasadena-based eHarmony, company founder Neil Clark Warren and his wife Marylyn, the company's former vice president, as defendants. It seeks class action status, a jury trial and unspecified damages.
The company, which conducts extensive personality profiling before introducing couples with matching values and interests, denied the allegation.
"The research that eHarmony has developed, through years of research, to match couples has been based on traits and personality patterns of successful heterosexual marriages," a company statement said.
"Nothing precludes us from providing same-sex matching in the future, it's just not a service we offer now based upon the research we have conducted," the statement said.Complicating matters is the fact that Eharmony's founder is an evangelical Christian with apparent ties to Focus on the Family.
And this is probably the real reason for the suit. One of the commenters over at Volokh Conspiracy makes one of those statements that pretty well tells me everything I need to know about him:
Yup. He sure seems happy to me. And then this claim:
Aha! I knew it. Every time I've seen one of those E-Harmony commercials with "Dr. Neil Clark Warren" the "founder" of e-harmony I've said to myself that he looks like a complete, total, 100% fundamental evangelical christian. I'm being completely serious here. There is a look. It's in the eyes mostly. But until now I've never had confirmation of this fact. I can pick an evangelical christian out of a lineup 9 times out of 10 just by looking at their face. I'm happy to have confirmation on Neil Clark Warren because I've been wondering if my evangelical-radar was correct. He's probably the most evangelical looking guy I've ever seen, though, so I was 99% certain.There is no expertise in matching people. One person says they like action films, so they match you with other people who like action films. Ditto with music types, life aspirations, etc. Just as applicable to homosexuals as it is (if at all) to heterosexuals. The "we don't have experience with matching homosexuals" is a plausible sounding but totally b.s. excuse for discrimination.
Showing that this idiot is ignorant in many areas.
I have long had a philosophical objection to anti-discrimination laws that affect private businesses. I was grudgingly prepared to accept them with respect to race because for generations, governments actively forced private businesses to discriminate based on race. The free market, while not perfect in this area, has substantial corrective mechanisms in it to deal with irrational discrimination. Thomas Sowell's Markets and Minorities has detailed examination of this, and why governments had to force discrimination on private businesses as a result.
Anti-discrimination laws have expanded more and more widely to include groups that were not in the equivalent position of American blacks. Hispanics were never enslaved in America. They were not the targets of de jure segregation in schools as blacks were. The mother of a friend graduated from the University of Texas in 1948--and while Texas spent money irrationally to prevent blacks from attending white universities, a very large fraction of her fellow graduates were Hispanics.
We've spent more than forty years now trying to deal with the effects of racial discrimination against blacks--and it is not clear to me that the need for these laws is still there. As more than a few black leaders have admitted, the major obstacle for blacks today isn't racial discrimination, it is other blacks. The time has come for anti-discrimination laws aimed at private businesses that are not government contractors to go away--and it is because of suits like this one. What's next? Shall we make it unlawful for churches to refuse to hire Muslims? How about making it unlawful for the Catholic Church to limit the priesthood to men?
The "right to privacy" argument that homosexuals used to use was historically incorrect, but at least it led the right direction--less government. Homosexual activists now demand more government, doing more things and telling people what they must do, and when, and with whom. They should reconsider Aesop's fable of the frogs who wanted a king.
If the government has authority to tell businesses who they must do business with, might it not in the future have authority to tell businesses who they must not do business with? "Congress has decided that homosexuals are bad role models for our children--and so it has passed a law prohibiting homosexuals from working as teachers or child care workers, in both public and private institutions."
It's unfortunate that homosexuals aren't content to be left alone, but must now force everyone to pretend that homosexuality is okay. This is part of why I have become far less libertarian over time, because it appears that a society can't tolerate homosexuality without turning into a police state run for the benefit of homosexuals--where speaking against homosexuality gets you prosecuted, or held without bail.
What's Going On In Iraq?
Michael Yon, as usual, is providing astonishing news coverage of what is going on in Iraq--and coverage like this makes me proud to be an American:
I can't even begin to summarize adequately Yon's coverage of how Lt. Col. Crissman deftly and without bloodshed arrested Hamid. I can only tell you that reading Yon's description of it makes you realize that the U.S. Armed Forces are filled with some of the smartest people that America produces.
Some Things Aren't Worth Drawing a Gun to Protect
I blogged on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog when this story was first reported, and at least at first glance, it appeared as though the clerk may have been legally in the right--although it is foolish to chase someone out of the store because they stole some merchandise--especially stuff worth so little.
I've just updated that entry with this news story:NASHVILLE, Tenn.- A South Nashville store clerk who shot a man he said was shoplifting from his market has been charged with murder.
The initial reports were that Bilbrey and Huddelston engaged in "a brief struggle" during which Huddelston reached inside of his shirt. If that was correct, then Bilbrey might have had good reason to believe that Huddelston was reaching for a weapon. The account of the incident as described above suggests that Huddelston was not a legitimate threat to Bilbrey, and thus Bilbrey's use of deadly force was not justified.
Convenience store clerk Jefferson Bilbrey, 45, was free on $80,000 bond Tuesday on a charge of second-degree murder for the March 10 shooting death of Richard Huddleston, Metro police said in a news release.
Police said Huddleston, 22, was stealing a beer and ball caps from a Shell Market on Haywood Lane when Bilbrey confronted him.
Huddleston ran outside the market and Bilbrey followed him and fired a .38-caliber revolver as Huddletson got into a car.
"Bilbrey did have a valid handgun carry permit; however, the police department's investigation, along with reviews by the District Attorney's office and the grand jury, determined that his use of deadly force was not justified under the circumstances," according to a Metro police news release.
Huddleston's victim's mother Cheryl Huddleston said he wasn't armed and that the shooting was senseless.
Bilbrey no longer works at that Shell Market. Huddleston's mother currently has a civil suit against the store owner.
"It is our understanding that they have encouraged their store clerks to go out and get licensed to carry pistols and I just believe that that's the wrong message," said Huddleston's attorney Michael Rowan.
He points to an incident only months before Huddelston's death.
Police said in September, Bilbrey fired his pistol at a driver of a tractor trailer he said drove too close to him as he took out the store trash.
Bilbrey shot at the big rig driver because the driver tried to make a U-turn in the market's parking lot.
"Evidently he seems to be really quick with the trigger," Rowan said.
Some beers and some hats. It is crazy to risk arrest--or getting shot--to steal stuff of so little value. It is crazy to risk getting hurt or confronting criminal prosecution to stop someone from stealing stuff of so little value. I suppose if Bilbrey were the proprietor, and Huddelston was running off with something worth thousands of dollars it might make some sense to attempt to prevent Huddelston's escape with the goods, but over a few dollars worth of stuff? This makes no sense for anyone. Huddelston is dead, and Bilbrey will, even if found innocent, spend many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of his life fighting the charges.
There are things worth killing someone to protect. But not some beer and some hats.
More on the Murders in Moscow
I mentioned a few weeks back that an AP reporter told me that BATF told him that the AK-47 used was a full auto--and a legal, properly transferred one at that. Remarkable. While I was on vacation, I received an email from an acquaintance who remembers me from Cotati Rod & Gun Club in California--and tells me that BATF was threatening to prosecute his son-in-law, a gun dealer in Havard, Idaho, for selling Hamilton the full auto conversion parts for the AK-47.
Which is it? Was it a legal, properly transferred full auto AK-47? Or was it an illegal conversion? One or the other--but both can't be true.
When O'Reilly Goes Off The Rails...
It is pretty sad. I watched him interview an acquaintance, Dave Kopel, this evening about a controversy involving Boulder, Colorado High School. Apparently a couple of the local radio talk show hosts have taken some remarks from speakers at an event at the school out of context as implying that kids should be sexually promiscuous and experimenting with illegal drugs. You can read the transcripts here.
I confess that I share O'Reilly's revulsion at the way that these speakers approached the topics. However, it appears to me that the objective was to appear sufficiently hip to be taken seriously--and in a very, very liberal place like Boulder, I would expect that approaching these topics in a manner that would not offend Bill O'Reilly would be mean that the important part of the messages these speakers were giving, would be lost.
What were the messages? One of the speakers who O'Reilly castigated for mentioning that some therapists have used the drug Ecstasy as part of therapy, also pointed out:And there's no question that people's worlds are changed after their consciousness is changed. Well, you have to really sort of think, am I ready to have my world changed? I’m 14 years old. Maybe I'm not ready to see what one sees on LSD. Maybe I'm not ready to have the feelings that mescaline provides in my body, or ecstasy, because a lot of those feelings have to do with feelings of being out of control, and they can be very scary to a person who doesn't have a strong enough sense of themselves, and that’s why people end up having bad trips at young ages. They're just not ready.
There's a playwright that O'Reilly is angry about for saying that condoms aren't good. But you read the transcript, and you can see that he's making a couple of points about how 15 year olds think about condoms (if they think of them at all)--while making a couple of points that, if Dr. James Dobson made them in front of a public school audience, would have the ACLU filing suit to stop:
...
I'm a member of that generation, so you know, LSD was my drug of choice in college, and I lost a lot of friends. I had one friend who jumped out of a third story window. He thought he could fly. That's just one example. So, with non-responsible use, I think what Sanho says, some of you just won't be there.And you at 15, little Antonio, should have waited to have sex. Because I know now, and I know you weren't ready for what you felt. And when you got older and you were ready, it was transcending, and beautiful, and amazing, and like God, but you didn't wait, and you should have at least known that when Carla, super hot junior, invited you over to her house for the first time for you to have sex, when you were a sophomore, and she tells you, "It's okay, you’ll like it," she's telling you the truth. But when she tells you don’t worry, her mom never comes home this early, she's lying. (laughter from audience) Because by the time she tells you that, when you’re naked on her bed with her, her mom is already in the house, coming up the stairs. And when you hide, don't hide in her mom's shower, because for some reason, that's the first place she looks. (laughter from audience)
...
And she says, "Don’t worry, my mom won’t be back," that’s true. And you say something about a condom and she says, "Don’t worry, I'm clean, and I can’t get pregnant," and I swear to God she said, "because the moon is full." (laughter from audience) And when she says that, don't believe her. Because a few weeks later she says she's late getting her period, and those four days waiting until she finally gets her period are the longest of your short life. (laughter from audience) And from that day on, you swear you will always use condoms.
...
So its no surprise that me at 15 stopped using condoms when she said she was going on the pill, and the next thing you know, something is leaking out of your penis, and it hurts when you pee. So then you find yourself in a clinic across town, hands around your ankles. Dr. Walters pulls out a huge q-tip meant for a horse or something, (laughter from audience) and sticks it right there and says, “This might hurt for a moment.” (laughter from audience) And he puts it in where things should only come out, and you say "Doc, that kind of hurts," and he says, "Yeah? Well, you should have thought about that if you weren’t using condoms." (laughter and applause from audience)
UPDATE: A reader points out that Dr. Becker also made this statement:Joel Becker: I would also vote for the legalization of most drugs. I think that we’re missing a real opportunity here to regulate something in a way that will work a lot better. I happen to live in the state of California in the city of Los Angeles, which has been described as America’s Amsterdam. We have legalized medical marijuana in the state of California. There are 110 marijuana clubs in the city of Los Angeles. There was an article on the cover of the Los Angeles Magazine that said “When Did LA Become, Like, the Capitol of Marijuana, Like, in the US?” And it is. If you want to get marijuana in the city of Los Angeles, all you’ve got to do is go to a doctor who will write you a ‘script. You go to a club. You go and you buy somewhat regulated production marijuana so you know you’re not getting stuff with chemicals in it. They not only sell marijuana, they sell hash, they sell baked goods. We have brownies, we have cookies, all the things you might want, so come on over. (laughter from audience)
I'm afraid that while Becker did acknowledge the hazards of drug abuse, this is certainly a statement of active support for marijuana use.
Ocean Motion
I've mentioned sea sickness. I wasn't spectacularly miserable (as long as I didn't read), but it was still the single worst aspect of the experience--and the one most likely to discourage me from doing a cruise again. A few lessons that I learned:
1. Don't even think of reading.
2. If you try to read (including reading on a computer screen), it helps to have a cold brisk wind and a view.
3. Motion sickness medications such as Bonine are chemically similar to antihistamines, and have similar effects, such as drowsiness. Even though Bonine is purportedly not drowsiness inducing, I find that it does that to me.
4. If I took an antihistamine just before going to bed (so that the rocking of the ship didn't keep me up), I slept well, and I had no motion sickness the next day, as long as I didn't try to read. If I took motion sickness medicine in the daytime, it made me drowsy, and taking another antihistamine at night made me drowsy the next day.
5. It seemed (and an intuitive analysis of the forces suggests) that being near the center of the ship reduced the severity of aft/stern motion.
6. I suspect that having beds aligned with the direction of travel might help. Some cabins have the beds aligned that way; ours was perpendicular to the motion of travel.
A Bit More About the Cruise
These are big ships. As we were approaching our ship, the Sun Princess, we were handed a schematic map with dimensions--about as big as the Titanic, one of the largest passenger liners of its era. (Maybe not the best comparison to make....) If you haven't been up close to one...
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
This may give a bit better idea of their scale, from the dock at Skagway.
Click to enlarge
They are also luxurious--at least in the common areas. I really don't have any pictures that convey this adequately, but imagine the nicest fancy hotel in a big city--and that's about what they are like.
The staterooms are another matter. As you might expect on a ship, most of the rooms are efficient in their use of space. We had an interior double cabin, and it was tight. Suggestion: my son and a friend shared another interior double cabin with the two beds on opposite sides of the room--and it felt far larger.
The bathroom is compact. You can wash your hands without getting off the toilet.
In retrospect, I think the interior double wasn't necessarily a good choice. Not being able to see outside was, as I have previously mentioned, somewhat claustrophobic, and I also think that I might have done better about motion sickness if I had been able to see the outside. It was also very easy to sleep in without exterior sources of light. It makes me glad to be back home, in my own little bed with a window that opens!
Californians: Time to Light Up The Phones in SacramentoCALNRA: AB 362 Amended To Impose Background Check Fees To Buy Ammo
What amazes me is the open dishonesty of such a measure. Ammunition without a gun is not a hazard. All firearms transfers in California (with a few very odd exceptions within family, or involving long gun "curios and relics" as defined by federal law) must be done through a licensed dealer or a police department. This has been the case since 1991--long enough that if background check requirements work well, you should expect to see a significant reduction in the pool of guns in criminal hands by now.
7:55 PM, 5/31/2007 - PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
AMMO SALES RECORDS (AB 362) was passed out of the Assembly Appropriations Committee today, next stop is the Assembly Floor. The author, De Leon, is expected to amend the bill to add a "User Fee" to cover the cost of the background check required whenever ammo is purchased.
Presently, it costs $25.00 to cover the background check when one buys a gun. WHAT WILL IT COST YOU TO PURCHASE A BOX OF AMMO?
NRA's state lobbyist Ed Worley requests that every California gun-owner "call every Assembly Member on the planet" and express their outrage at this insane idea. Detailed Assembly Member contact info is available here:
http://calnra.com/legs/asm.shtml
More information and ONE-CLICK service to the Assembly is available here:
http://calnra.com/legs.shtml?year=2007&summary=ab362
Stay on top of other CA-related firearms issues at:
http://calnra.com/legs.shtml
Mike Haas
Electronic Communications Director
NRA Members' Councils of California
http://calnra.com/
So, if background checks work to keep guns away from those who are not allowed guns (convicted felons, most recent violent misdemeanants, those involuntarily hospitalized for mental illness in the last five years, minors), why does California need a background check for ammunition?
And if background checks don't work to keep guns out of the wrong hands, or at least don't work well enough to require background checks for ammo--why should we assume that ammunition background checks will be more effective?
Pure and simple: this is an attempt to make ammunition so expensive that it will discourage the average poor gun owner from owning a gun--the guy who buys a couple of boxes of .22 shells to go shoot his cheap .22 rifle, or the person living in South Central Los Angeles or East Palo Alto who needs a gun for self-defense, and isn't going to be buying a 500 round case. Each time he goes somewhere to practice, he's going to have to buy a box of ammunition--and that background check fee is going to more than double the price of that box of ammo.
Another Tragedy That Could Have Been Avoided
From the May 29, 2007 Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times:
In 1960, Kelly would have been in a hospital, rather than out on the street with a gun, getting into arguments.
Former ACLU Official Pleads Guilty
From the June 2, 2007 Washington Post:
As I mentioned when this fine upstanding member of the bar was arrested on these charges:
...I've long been unsure whether the ACLU's ahistorical interpretation of the First Amendment was an irrational zealotry for a principle for something a bit darker.
This inclines me to wonder how much of the ACLU's self-destructive enthusiasm might reflect the secret wishes and desires of prominent ACLU members like Rust-Tierney.
Those Syrian Musicians on the Plane
Remember back in 2004, when odd behavior by some Syrian musicians on a flight here in the U.S. led to concerns that this was a terrorist "dry run"--and the mainstream media (and the Bush Administration) said, "No, nothing to worry about?" From the May 30, 2007 Washington Times:A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 and reveals several missteps by government officials, including failure to file an incident report until a month after the matter became public.
The Inspector General's report is here.
According to the Homeland Security report, the "suspicious passengers," 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended the visas one week after the June 29, 2004, incident.
The report also says that a background check in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced "positive hits" for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.
In addition, the band's promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier. He was detained a third time in September on a return trip to the U.S. from Istanbul, the details of which were redacted.
The inspector general criticized the Homeland Security officials for not reporting the incident to the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC), which serves as the nation's nerve center for information sharing and domestic incident management.
The report comes three years after the incident, which was not officially acknowledged until a month later, after The Washington Times reported passenger and marshal complaints that the incident resembled a dry run for a terrorist attack. After reviewing the report, air marshals say it confirms their earlier suspicions.
Official denial
An air marshal who told The Times that he has been involved personally in terror probes that were ignored by federal security managers, called such behavior typical.
I sometimes wonder if DHS (and their Canadian counterparts) is making a serious effort on this. I just went on an Alaska cruise. A friend of mine took a train from Skagway, Alaska into Canada. Canada's border inspectors looked at his U.S. passport--but took no information that might have allowed checking names against a watch list.
When we entered Canada at Victoria, Canadian customs gave only the most cursory look at our U.S. passports. I am sure that I could make a U.S. passport that would get past them. (And as I have mentioned in the past, Canadian border guards are still not armed, unlike their American counterparts.)
When I re-entered the U.S. at Seattle, I didn't even have to show my passport. I asked the smiling DHS employee if she needed to see our passports. Nope. What's the point of maintaining watch lists for terrorists, or laws prohibiting unlawful immigration, if you aren't even going to try and see if those coming into the country are U.S. citizens?
Amazing! It Is Possible To Fire An Academic For Academic Fraud
Or so it appears, from this article in the May 29, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education:
Complain to Dogpile.com--And They Listen
Or so it seems. A reader sent me the following:
I guess dogpile.com listens. By the time I returned from vacation, the blocks seem to have been removed.
I sent the following request for them to consider the absurdity of their actions. Their contact info is at the bottom of their page.
-James Grant
Dear DogPile,
You take a very strange position on what adult content is. I was looking for information on "gun safety" and then received a block from your censors. So, I wanted to see how far DogPile is carrying this absurd restriction of access.
I decided to type in things that actually are disconcerting. I entered "robbery techniques" "burglary tools" "stealing cars" "make heroin" "grow marijuana" "Adultery", "Murder" "Mayhem" "Rape" "Incest".
All were given a green light from your filters. . Tips and how to's about anything criminal.
No filters, roadblocks, or verifications were required.
So what exactly is it about my safety that your are trying to protect me from? Please re-enable your search engine to pass lawful information freely and without hindrance.
-James Grant
If A Preacher Repeated This From the Pulpit...
It would be sure signs of homophobia. From AFP May 31, 2007:A gay gang that allegedly raped victims lured on the Internet, drugged them and infected them with the AIDS virus has shocked the Netherlands and raised questions over its liberal sex culture.
I'm Back
And I only have several hundred emails to read, once the spam largely filtered out. I'll have pictures to share, and more--but it might take a day or two or three. So many of you responded to my question about estimating wind speed, and sent links to interesting, amusing, or shocking stories--I'll try to use them all!
Humor (Sort Of)
On the way to Seattle to catch the ship for the Alaska cruise, my son mentioned that the last time he drove I-84 to Portland and back, he passed a two tanker semi with the following hazard warning signs on it.
Radioactive
Corrosive
Flammable
What was left? Hip-Hop?
