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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, June 09, 2007
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. Labels: deinstitutionalization 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. Labels: concealed carry, gun rights 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. UPDATE: I just searched the University of Washington's faculty directory; Gonzalez isn't listed there anymore, so that webpage must be old. Labels: academic integrity 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. Labels: deinstitutionalization 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. Labels: machining Friday, June 08, 2007
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. 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. 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. Labels: political correctness, terrorism 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. 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. Labels: gun defense aftermath, gun self-defense 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 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: 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. 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. Labels: intelligent design, political correctness 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.) Labels: terrorism Thursday, June 07, 2007
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? 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. Labels: global warming 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.  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge Here is most of Skagway--which shrinks down to about 160 people in winter.  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge There was an explanation of it on an historical plaque:  Click to enlarge Skagway is even more of a tourist destination than Ketchikan:  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge It turns out to be a snow plow.  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge This is supposedly the most photographed building in Alaska--interesting because of the vast number of pieces of driftwood that make up the facade:  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge For a place this cold and far north, the plants and flowers are astonishingly vibrant in their colors.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge This spruce tree with red tips is called, surprisingly enough, a red-tipped spruce.  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge Labels: Alaska cruise Wednesday, June 06, 2007
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.  Click to enlarge 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):  Click to enlarge There are also some amusingly labeled beers from California, such as the Lobotomy Bock in the center of the top shelf.  Click to enlarge 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:  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge Here are some shots of the Mendenhall Glacier from various distances--and this should give you an idea of how big this is.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge 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.  Click to enlarge Labels: Alaska cruise 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: 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: 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: (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. 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. Labels: gun rights, hypocrisy 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. Labels: child sexual abuse Tuesday, June 05, 2007
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. Labels: humor 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. 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. Labels: deinstitutionalization 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. Labels: gun rights 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:
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:
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:
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:
He was convicted when he was 24, with a child under 16. 2. Born in 1979: | |||||||||||||||||||||
