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Labels: machining Labels: health care Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, homosexuality Labels: astrophotography Labels: house project Labels: house project Labels: cars Labels: weird science Labels: becoming wealthy Labels: astrophotography Labels: health care Labels: alternative power Labels: astrophotography Labels: becoming wealthy Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: vulgarity Labels: immigration Labels: crime Labels: immigration Two Christian pastors convicted under a "hate crimes" plan for "vilifying" Islam by quoting from the Quran during a seminar on jihad again are free to debate religious beliefs following a settlement of their long-running case, according to a report from Voice of the Martyrs. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal of Australia, the Islamic Council of Victoria and Catch the Fire Ministries have reached an agreement that citizens have the right to "robustly debate religion" and "criticize religious beliefs" within the limits of the law, the VOM report said. Terms were not revealed, but VOM reported that the pastors have spent more than $500,000 over the years defending their right to present their views and insights about Islam. The Islamic Council of Victoria had filed a complaint that resulted in convictions for Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot – the first convictions in Australia under the nation's religious vilification ban, the Victorian Religious and Racial Tolerance Act which took effect in 2002. The letter was written five years ago in an Alberta newspaper by Minister Stephen Boissoin. Two weeks after the letter was published, a 17-year-old homosexual youth was beaten. A complaint was filed against the minister, and the commission is hearing the case this week. Mat Staver is founder of Orlando-based Liberty Counsel. He contends Canada is treading on the minister's free speech. "What we see happening in Canada, is a person's free speech -- speech on the matter of homosexuality, which says that homosexuality is wrong and which speaks of the homosexual agenda -- is now being punished in a court of law and the person is being put on trial solely for what the individual spoke." Labels: freedom of speech Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, abortion, gun rights Labels: becoming wealthy Over the last few years, fraternity members at Dartmouth College, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have gotten in trouble for shooting BB guns at members of their fraternities or unsuspecting people on campus. Fraternity members are not the only undergraduates who own guns, but Greeks are more likely to own them. While 5.2 percent of fraternity and sorority members surveyed in the 2001 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Survey owned guns, 4.1 percent of non-Greek undergraduates were gun owners. Matthew Miller, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard University and the primary author of the study , said that “the kinds of behavior that students who have guns exhibit are also the kinds of behavior that students in fraternities often demonstrate,” listing binge drinking, driving while intoxicated and “general aggression” as behaviors associated with fraternity members. “There’s a decent chance that at any school where students have guns, members would be more likely to have guns than other students,” Miller said. “And they’d probably be engaging in riskier behavior, maybe with their guns.” Guns plus alcohol sometimes yields accidental shooting. Fists plus alcohol sometimes yields drunken brawl. Cars plus alcohol sometimes yields drunk driving accidents. Penis plus alcohol sometimes yields rape. If there is something that colleges might want to seriously considering fixing, maybe it is the alcohol? Alcohol (and many of the illegal drugs) reduce inhibitions and impair judgment—both of which are in short supply among many young people. Focus on the real problem: alcohol. Labels: gun rights Labels: terrorism
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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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Gun Laws Don't Work
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Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
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Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
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A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
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Neocon Blues
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Sherline Vertical Mill as Exercise Equipment
The blade on my chop saw is getting a bit dull, I think, and some of the 30 degree angle cuts I made on the Delrin pieces came out rougher and less even than I wanted. So I put them in the vertical mill, and ran the flycutter over them to even them up. The result is beautiful, but cranking the table back and forth for the number of units I made gave my right arm quite a workout!
Video Cameras (Again)
I requested information a few days ago, and my readers responded! Thanks to all! It appears that the cost difference between buying a video capture card for my Hi-8 video camera, and buying a low-end digital camcorder is only about $100. I'm shocked at how inexpensive the low-end digital camcorders have gone!
One of my applications is time lapse photography--and there's two ways to do it: capture at normal video speed, and then use various programs in the computer to grab every nth frame (which is an oversimplification when you are talking about most computer video formats), or find a camera that is capable of recording at something other than 30 frames per second.
Some cameras, primarily intended for security applications, will record one second every 30 seconds. That's not what I need. Ideally, I would like a digital camcorder where you can set the frame rate, somewhere in the range from 15 to 5 frames per second, providing a speedup of 2x to 6x normal. This also has the advantage that you can fit a lot more video on the camcorder's memory device.
Any suggestions? Even if it is a pretty expensive, professional grade camera, if there is a place that I can rent one, that might be acceptable.
Republican Health Insurance Tax Credit Plan
I guess Bush is backing this health insurance tax credit plan:Burr's bill would encourage families to find their own health coverage, and then help them pay the bills through refundable tax credits of up to $5,400 a family. The proposal could bring health coverage to the North Carolina residents now without it.
I can see some merits to the proposal: it would give Americans who are not currently covered the opportunity to purchase whatever kind or level of health insurance that they wished. For some single young people, who are seldom sick (and tend not to buy individual health insurance--even when they can afford it), it might make sense to buy coverage for only hospitalization and other major expenses.
Advocates for the uninsured say Burr's proposal could jeopardize not only low-income families and chronically ill patients, but also the employment-based health-care system that now covers 65 percent of Americans. Burr's measure would begin taxing the value of health-care plans that many employers now offer workers, a controversial provision sure to face opposition. Such benefits are now tax-free, both for the employer and the worker.
The legislation would offer special tax credits to residents to help cover the cost of health insurance and other health bills: $2,160 per person, up to a maximum of $5,400 per family.
Burr, a member of the Senate health committee, said his plan would level the field among residents. He described a Robin Hood-like bureaucracy that would take money from those with rich health-care plans to help pay for those who have nothing.
"Millions of Americans who are currently uninsured would have access to coverage in the free market," Burr said. He said the plan would give patients buying power by allowing them to hunt for their own, personalized coverage.
For people who visit the doctor fairly often, as is often the case if you have small children, a refundable tax credit of $2,160 per person per year would pay a big part of the costs of individual health insurance. (From purchasing individual health insurance for a family member recently, I know that medical coverage is about $350 a month right now in Idaho.)
There are a lot of poorly paid Americans who have group health insurance available to them through their employer--but the employer doesn't pay any of the costs. I'm not sure what those policies cost; my guess is that $2,160 per person per year might pick up a big part.
What makes the proposal more problematic is that it would tax the health insurance benefits that most employers now provide to their employees. (And yes, as much as liberals like to pretend otherwise, a strong majority of Americans have health coverage right now, either through an employer. through Medicare, Medicaid, or the Veteran's Administration. (Although the stories I hear about Medicare, Medicaid, and VA, suggest that asking for more federal involvement isn't a recipe for great health care.)
Right now, the majority of Americans with good jobs, or whose parents have good jobs, get pretty decent health insurance. I can't wildly enthusiastic about my current employer's insurance plan, especially compared to the company I worked for previously--which had 12 employees, lower deductibles, and lower premiums. But it's nothing to grouse about, either. I know what the insurance costs are for my employer and for me, and if this becomes a taxable benefit, offset by $2,160 per person per year of tax credits, I expect that health insurance to get a lot uglier than it is now.
There are so many problems with our health insurance system in America--and contrary to what some people would like to believe, countries with single payer insurance or socialized medicine have significant problems as well. I've blogged before about Canada's problems with long waiting lists, and the signs that politically important groups are going to get elective procedures (like sex changes) prioritized over real health problems.
One of the problems with health insurance is that a lot of what insurance is covering doesn't make much sense. Typically, you insure for items that are likely to be very expensive, but where the chances of that event happening in any given year aren't very high. For example, you get collision insurance for your car because you aren't likely to be in a major auto accident in any given year. If you are, it will cost you $5000-$20,000, depending on the severity of the accident. It makes sense to pay $2000 a year to insure, with the expectation that there a good chance that every 5-10 years, you will be in an accident like that.
On the other hand, you don't buy insurance for your car's wax job. You know that it is a certainty that it will need to be done every year (or more often, for you fastidious sorts). The cost is small; about $10 or so, if you use really good wax. If someone was prepared to write car wax insurance, the cost of adminstration, having an agent come out to verify that you really needed another wax job, and so on, would mean that you were paying $80 a year for car wax insurance.
There's quite a bit of stuff that health insurance covers right now that just doesn't make a lot of sense to do through an insurer, whether it is private or governmental, because the administrative costs are so substantial, and you can be pretty darn sure that you are going to use that service several times a year or more. I'm guessing that most Americans see a doctor about 1-5 times a year; a few may see a doctor more often than that. What does a doctor visit cost?
If you go to at least some doctors, tell him you have health insurance, and you want to just write a check, you will be astonished how much cheaper that doctor visit can be. I know from experience, from a time in my life when, more out of stupidity than anything else, I had no health insurance. (I was 20 years old, making more money than I knew how to spend, and I was in good health.) A few years back, when we lived in California, my family physician charged my health insurer $75 for a doctor's visit; another family we knew had no health insurance, partly from poverty, partly from a father that had never grown up (which contributed to the poverty). They paid the same doctor $25 for a doctor's visit--check written when they arrived.
If you have health insurance, the doctor's visit is going to probably cost $40 to $120. Your insurer will then negotiate that down to $30-$60, and you will end up paying $15 to $40 as a copayment. I recently visited a specialist to deal with a cyst on my lower eyelid--the copayment ($40 because this was a specialist) was more than my insurer paid the doctor!
Back when I was "self-insured," my doctor ran a lot fewer tests, because he knew that I was paying for it myself--no insurance company was involved. Are the extra tests useful? Sometimes--and sometimes they are protecting the doctor from a malpractice suit. The more that you have to make decisions about which tests are really necessary, the more it reduces costs.
Maybe what makes sense is to have coverage only for the equivalent of that car crash: hospital visits; specialists; procedures or tests that are expensive and not terribly common. Right now, we as individuals, and as a society, are spending a lot of money on insurance policies that cover things that would be a bit cheaper if:
1. Our employer didn't send money to an insurance company.
2. Who waits for us to go to the doctor about a sinus infection.
3. Who charges us 50% more to cover the team of clerks processing the insurance paperwork and waiting for payment.
4. While a veritable army of clerks at the insurance company processes the paperwork from the doctor, verifies coverage, checks the ICD codes, and sends out paperwork and checks to the doctor and to us.
And note: this would be true for a "single payer" insurance system as well. Most socialized medicine systems only knock some of of this process out, because you still have to verify coverage, and there's no shortage of paperwork in socialized medicine systems.
There's another side to this as well, if we adopt a "single payer" system or a true socialized medicine scheme. If the government pays the piper, the government also calls the tune. As the AIDS epidemic, and the government's response to it demonstrated, a well organized pressure group can demand and get disproportionate funding for their pet disease. Sorry, but that's the way representative government works. If sufferers from disease X are very well organized, or politically connected, they may be able to get disease X prioritized over other diseases that are actually bigger problems. The opposite is a disease like schizophrenia, that has no political organization at all, but is one of the largest single causes of all medical costs in advanced societies, and gets relatively little research funding.
What if the government decides that it needs to "contain costs?" One way to contain costs is the Canadian model: don't invest enough in resources, and let people get sicker or die while waiting to get to the head of the line.
Another way to contain costs is to start pressuring people to make better choices. Insurance companies already do a bit of this, but it is largely polite scolding. I understand that at one time, some Canadian provinces refused to pay for oxygen for emphysema patients who would not stop smoking. This makes perfect sense to me--but is it really that hard to see a single payer or socialized medicine system refusing to cover people who smoke? What about people who drink to excess (however they chose to define it). What about not getting your share of green, leafy vegetables? These are all the sort of things that a sensible government would do to reduce costs--assuming that they were interested in reducing costs.
Health insurance is a very big, very complex problem. People that reduce it down to just "greedy lawyers" or "greedy insurance companies" or "all our problems will go away with socialized medicine" really haven't thought about this very seriously.
UPDATE: One aspect of the problem that I haven't addressed above is the problem of transfers to the needy. In some circles, the idea of the government taking care of the poor by providing health insurance is sacrilege. But as Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England reminds us:Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb....
A Christian Commonwealth, as American society was understood by its Founders, had an obligation to care for the poor. This didn't necessarily mean that every poor person had a right to a particular standard of living, but as Blackstone points "every thing necessary for their support." This would certainly include necessary medical care--but not necessarily elective procedures such as sex changes, which seems to be on the planned improvements list for Ontario's health plan. (I put the quote in from Blackstone just to annoy people like BinkyBoy, who seem to want the Christian Commonwealth obligations to care for the poor, without the equivalent Christian Commonwealth obligations to pass and enforce the moral laws that go with it.)
The law not only regards life and member, and protects every man in the enjoyment of them, but also furnishes him with every thing necessary for their support. For there is no man so indigent or wretched, but he may demand a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life, from the more opulent part of the community, by means of several statutes enacted for the relief of the poor, of which in their proper places.
Exactly how to best provide essential medical care is certainly worth discussing. The Hill-Burton Act passed in 1946 obligated public and nonprofit hospitals built with, or receiving federal funds to provide emergency medical care and some quantity of free non-emergency medical care to those who could not afford it. Emergency rooms meet this obligation, but they are a very expensive and inefficient way to provide non-emergency medical care to the poor. Medicaid does a better job, but I know that a lot of doctors are unwilling to take Medicaid. I remember a family physician of mine in California was going on and on about the importance of doing something about providing medical care to the poor, while he was removing a cyst from my chest. "So, do you accept Medicaid patients?" "No--the paperwork is a hassle." Physician, heal thyself.
This tax credit proposal would certainly help those people who are not poor enough to be eligible for Medicaid, but still are too poor to obtain their own health insurance. But $2,160 per person per year does not seem like it is a big enough tax credit. Adding to my concerns, and showing the complexity of the problem, is that at least some people who are poor enough to deserve public assistance in obtaining medical insurance are rich enough to burn through several thousand dollars a year in cigarettes, marijuana, and alcohol. Some people are poor through no immediate fault of their own; others work hard to be unable to care for themselves.
The Power of Identity Politics
If one of the Republican debates was being sponsored by the NRA and several other "gun nut" groups, what would be the reaction of the news media? Screeching about how the Republican Party is now "owned" by the gun nuts, and how shameful this is.
But you aren't going to be hearing anything from the mainstream media now that groups representing a much smaller fraction of Americans--and who are at least as disapproved of by the majority as gun owners--is sponsoring one of the Democratic debates (depending on which ads they are running at the moment, this may not be worksafe):Four Democratic presidential candidates are now confirmed to participate in the first-ever televised primary debate about LGBT issues, sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign and Logo. Senators Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, and Barack Obama and former senator John Edwards will attend the event, to be held August 9 in Los Angeles. But one candidate, former senator Mike Gravel, was not invited to the debate because he didn't meet the fund-raising threshold for participants.
I'm impressed--just about the only news organizations covering this are gay news organizations. Perhaps the mainstream media don't want to remind the voters that the Democrats are the gay party.
HRC spokesman Brad Luna said HRC and Logo initially set out to sponsor two different forums, one for Republican candidates and one for Democratic candidates.
“The precondition we set before those forums could be confirmed was that two out of the three leading candidates would have to confirm their attendance,” Luna said. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney declined the invitation, and Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain never responded, so the GOP forum never got off the ground.
Miracles of Image Processing
I mentioned a few days ago that some pictures that were almost not recognizably pictures were salvageable in the digital darkroom. In going through some recent pictures, I found two especially entertaining examples.
The first picture is one that I took at ASA 100 with Big Bertha, 1/1000th of a second. It came out completely black. There's no data there, right? (Fortunately an apparently black image isn't terribly large.)
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So I loaded this apparently completely dead image into HP Photosmart, and hit the "Auto Adjust" button. I have no idea what this does, exactly, but about half the time, it perfectly balances contrast and image brightness--and perhaps another 1/4 of the time it gets me close enough to fiddle with the other controls.
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Hard as it may be to believe, all that information was present in the "black" picture. Just because it doesn't look like much on the camera's screen, doesn't mean that there's nothing there!
There are limits to what you can do with this, of course. Here's another example that was completely white (1/6th of a second, ASA 100, again through Big Bertha). There was enough motion during that time, and enough light still in the sky, to make it a complete washout, no matter what I did to it.
As it came out of the camera:
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Best effort digital darkroom:
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Predator and Prey
My wife noticed this raptor of some sort outside the back door a few days ago:
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And then the reason why the raptor was sitting there:
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This picture shows the larger geographic relationship of what Tennyson called "Nature, red in tooth and claw":
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Bugs
If bugs bug you, cause hysterics, or otherwise make you uncomfortable, click here to skip to the next blog entry.
We have a lot of very interesting and sometimes beautiful insects up here. Along with the conventional enough praying mantis in a light green:
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We also this praying mantis in a darling shade of pink! (Perhaps he prays with the Metropolitan Church.)
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There seems to be as many patterns and colors on some of these critters as there are fingerprints. Sometimes, we aren't sure if we are seeing different species, subspecies, different diets, or just the insect equivalent of the diversity of human races.
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Ford Makes a Profit
I'm disappointed, because I was hoping the boycott would get their attention enough that they decided to become a car company again, and not primarily a social change instrument. Partly, I'm very drawn to the Jaguar X-type, and I really can't buy one as long as Ford's idiot campaign to promote moral destruction of America is under way. I did see one encouraging sign:DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) - Job cuts, slimmer losses in North America and good sales overseas helped Ford Motor Co. post surprise second-quarter earnings Thursday of $750 million, its first profitable quarter in two years.
If they sell Jaguar, then the purring kitty is again available for consideration as a replace for the Corvette next year.
The company also said the sale of its Jaguar and Land Rover subsidiaries was probable, and it said its U.S. market share rose during the quarter.
I wonder what effect such a sale might have on reliablity? It was rather a sad commentary on the state of Jaguar reliability that Ford's acquisition of Jaguar improved it!
Cue the Twilight Zone Theme Music...
It really fits this story:His name is Oscar. He's not the friendliest cat. But he has an uncanny knack for predicting within hours when nursing home patients with whom he lives are about to die.
I'm not one to go looking for supernatural meanings where a natural explanation is offered. Some have suggested that the nurses perhaps know which patients are close to death
Oscar lives at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, and is the subject of a fascinating essay in this week's issue of the prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.
What makes Oscar special is his ability to sense when one of the hospice's residents is about to die.
Every day, Oscar makes his rounds among the patients, entering each room and giving each patient a sniff. When he senses that someone is near the end of his or life, he will hop onto their bed and curl up beside them. Within hours, without fail, the patient will die.
Oscar has demonstrated his prognostication skills at least 25 times. He's considered so accurate that nursing home staff will immediately call family members once Oscar has chosen someone, since it usually means they have less than four hours to live.
Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician from Brown University in Providence, tells Oscar's story, noting that the feline has never been wrong yet.
"His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death," Dosa writes.
Raised at the nursing home since he was a kitten, Oscar is described as aloof -- even, at times, grouchy. But when he is on a death watch, he is as warm as can be. He will nuzzle a dying patient and purr, perhaps trying to offer whatever comfort he can.
Not As Stupid As I Look
I bought about $100K worth of callable Fannie Mae bonds yesterday morning, with an average annualized yield to worst of about 6.6%. And today?NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Bonds rose sharply Thursday as homebuilders reported weak earnings and a durable orders report came in lower than expected.
My reason was that I saw a lot of hints that in spite of the Fed's nervousness about inflation, the economy is running out of steam. Actually, the housing part of the economy is running out of steam, while other parts did not seem to be--but that durable orders report indicates that other parts of the economy are beginning to follow. (No surprise: a lot of the durable goods purchased ended up going into new houses, or getting purchased with home equity loans--which is stupid.)
The 10-year jumped 25/32, or $7.81 on a $1,000 note, to yield 4.80 percent, down from 4.90 percent Wednesday. The 30-year bond climbed 1-3/32, or $10.94 on a $1,000 note, to yield 4.95 percent, down from 5.02 percent. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.
The 5-year gained 21/32 to yield 4.62 percent. While the 2-year rose 9/32 to yield 4.57 percent.
The other hint is that I am seeing a lot of car companies offering zero percent loans. These are usually relatively short duration (two to three years), but often this shows that automobile demand is down and the car companies expect interest rates to be low enough over the next few years that they can afford to make these zero percent loans, because it isn't going to cost them much to finance cars at these low rates.
I just wish that I had been really smart, and bought another $100K worth of bonds at the same time!
Fix It In The Darkroom!
One of the marvelous things about a digital camera is how easy it is to fix problems in the darkroom! (Inside your computer.) As an example, I took the three pictures below at three different shutter speeds: 1/350th, 1/250th, and 1/125th of a second, ASA 100. (Maybe not the best choice for the Moon.) The first one was indistinguishable from random noise, the second was at least apparently the Moon, and third was a faint image. But once I had the chance to fiddle with them in HP Photosmart Premiere, they all came out roughly equivalent. 
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The data was already there--the levels were way too low on the first two pictures. Now, these aren't great pictures. When I worked at Jet Propulsion Labs, I worked on the boring part of the telemetry processing systems--not the sexy part, the pictures. One of my friends worked on the Viking image processing software--and he showed me a raw image as it arrived from the Viking Orbiter--and after post-processing. And yes, it was even more dramatic of a change than I experienced cleaning up these images.
I've written image processing software for amusement, back at the beginning of time. What you are doing is conceptually taking a collection of numbers that correspond to different brightness levels. If 0 is black, and 65535 is white, then taking the very first image, you find that effectively everything is a number between 0 and about 300; raising the image brightness involves rescaling 0 to 300 to be 0 to 65535. Obviously, the results won't be quite as precise and detailed as if you had a picture that all the values from 0 to 65535 in it. But it is astonishing how well you can fix an apparently "spoiled" picture this way!
Be Glad For Honest Leftists
This article in the July 24, 2007 Wall Street Journal describes what happens when leftists are honest about their intentions:When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as "laboratories of democracy," he didn't claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that "progressive" state a Petri dish for government-run health care.
A proposal this expensive tells you that some Wisconsin legislators are utterly out of touch with economic realities. Or perhaps they'll just prohibit businesses and employees from leaving the state.
This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the "single-payer," universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.
Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.
This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden. "At least federal taxes pay for an Army and Navy," quips R.J. Pirlot of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby.
As if that's not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%. One reason to expect costs to soar is that the state may become a mecca for the unemployed, uninsured and sick from all over North America. The legislation doesn't require that you have a job in Wisconsin to qualify, merely that you live in the state for at least 12 months. Cheesehead nation could expect to attract health-care free-riders while losing productive workers who leave for less-taxing climes.
There's an amusing comment over here:The way I see it, the legislature will screw up the economy so bad that everyone who can afford a bus ticket will get out of the state to avoid the inevitable soviet-style labor camps for tax debtors. The massive, rapid depopulation will depress housing prices below true market value. All I have to do is wait until the current legislators are lynched by angry mobs and replaced with reasonable people, then buy as much land as I can find, and wait for the market to return to normal levels. I’ll sell and make a bundle.
Oh, but I guess a bunch of people will probably have their lives destroyed in the process, so maybe there’s a down side that I haven’t seen yet.
Wind Power
Much of the year, we have a steady and powerful wind running up here. I had always assumed, because I had nothing to gauge it against, that it was about 40-50 mph. Now that I have an anemometer, I know the answer--and no, it isn't quite that fast.
The wind this afternoon is blowing about like it does from September through May (or at least, it feels like those winds). I went up to the back of the property, where the wind generator should go. According to the anemometer, it's averaging about 21.4 mph, with maximum speed of 30.9. I'm going to keep an idea on this for the next several days, but once this kind of a wind starts blowing here, it generally keeps blowing for days. If so, the wind generator makes more and more sense.
Big Bertha & The Moon
This was 1/350th of a second, ASA 400, using Big Bertha, my 17.5" reflector. Wow!
I've reduced this down a little because some of you don't want to download a 7 MB file.
Click to enalarge
Bonds For Those Prepared to Take Moderate Risks
Bonds that are S&P rated at BBB and above are considered "investment grade" while below BBB they are considered "junk bonds." What this means is that the risk of default is substantially higher. In exchange for the risk, you get much better returns.
As an example of an S&P BBB rated bond, CUSIP 577778CB7, May Dept. Stores, is a bond due 7/15/2024, with a 6.65% coupon--and the current price is 88.083. This means that the yield to maturity is 7.94%. This is a "Make Whole Call" bond, so there is a possibility that it could be called (at a price of 100) before the bond matures--and that, along with the risk, is why the yield is so spectacular.
I would not encourage anyone to invest a big chunk of the portfolio in a bond like this--but if you have some very, very safe bonds that are paying 6%, putting a small portion of your bond portfolio in something like this might be a prudent way to improve the average return.
A Gun Shop Owner Who Went Beyond The Call of Duty
But it wasn't enough. From the July 23, 2007 Denver Post:Aaron Snyder, the man killed at the state Capitol last week, was turned away from a Fort Collins gun shop in late March after he admitted he had struggled with delusions and depression.
Cates did the right thing. But involuntary commitment laws have been so emasculated that if Cates had called the police and described this conversation, it would have been a waste of everyone's time. In 1960, Snyder would probably have been questioned at some length and hospitalized for a while. Instead, Snyder was free to continue walking the streets, until he learned from his mistake in admitting why he wanted a gun.
Snyder wanted to rent a handgun and learn how to shoot it at Rocky Mountain Shooters Supply on March 30, but he was rejected after he noted a history of mental illness on the store's background check form, said the shop's owner, Tim Brough.
Snyder also told the store manager, Bill Cates, he needed to learn to shoot because he "was the divine leader of the nation and as such should know how to use a gun."
Cates suggested Snyder come back at a later date and take a handgun safety course first so Cates could determine whether he had severe problems.
Snyder later successfully purchased a handgun from Sportsman's Warehouse in Thornton.
Former Naval Person's Blog is Now Former Work-Safe Blog
Occasionally I look to see what other bloggers are linking to my posts. I saw the link (and don't click the link, especially if you are at work--for reasons that I am about to explain) Former Naval Person linked to my post about Harry Potter. So I clicked over there--and I was shocked. His blog is running ads that have hardcore obscene pictures in them--and quite a number of his other postings have pictures that you won't see on broadcast television.
I know that there are fleshblogs out there--but Former Naval Person's blog used to be a reasonably serious blog with an interest in naval stuff. I hope he's making some serious money pandering. It is sure not a way to be taken seriously.
UPDATE: Jim tells me that indeed, money is what drove the change in advertising--and he's not entirely comfortable with the ads that are running.
What A Concept! A Law Enforcement Agency Enforcing Laws!
From the July 20, 2007 East Valley Tribune:A “concentrated crackdown” on illegal immigrants started Friday night in Maricopa County. Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced he’s dispatched more than 200 deputies and posse members to saturate valley cities and roadways known to be corridors for human smuggling.
Unlike that other law enforcement agency mentioned in the article.
East Valley hot spots include Bush Highway, U.S. Highway 60 and “any major highway,” said deputy chief Brian Sands.
Arpaio said he’s also opening a hotline for tipsters to report suspected illegal immigrants.
Arpaio said the program is comprehensive and controversial, but that it’s constitutional.
“We’re not going to go out on a street corner and round up people because they look like they’re from a foreign country,” Arpaio said Friday.
He said it’s nothing like Chandler’s infamous 1997 “roundup,” in which police officers swept the city in search of illegal immigrants.
He added that no one has complained about racial profiling since his deputies began detaining illegal immigrants.
Arpaio said his deputies have already arrested and jailed about 614 illegal immigrants on felony charges since the Arizona law against human smuggling passed in March 2006.
The deputies’ strategies for the crackdown aren’t necessarily different from those they’ve been using already to target immigrants who have likely employed a human smuggler to help them enter the country.
...
Arpaio stressed the need for probable cause to arrest a suspect. That means a vehicle must have a fake license plate, be speeding, run a red light, or break some other law before deputies can pull over the vehicle and question its occupants.
The crackdown, which has no end date, will utilize 160 deputies and officers who’ve been trained by federal agents to enforce immigration law.
Of this group, 15 officers will be devoted strictly to the human smuggling unit funded by the state. To fill the personnel void this unit has created in the ranks, the sheriff said his office is recruiting officers from local and national police agencies to join his office through lateral transfers.
To further add to his numbers, the sheriff will deputize 64 federal immigration (ICE) agents on Monday, which will enable them to act as both federal and local law enforcement agents.
“We are quickly becoming a full-fledged anti-illegal immigration agency,” Arpaio said.
Honor Killings
Before you get too upset, yes, I know that most Muslims do not engage in "honor killings," such as the one described below. But the very nature of such murders--done because of what other people in the community would think if a woman were allowed to get away what she did--tells me that these aren't a bizarre deviant part of Islam, but something only a little out of the mainstream. Read this article from the July 21, 2007 Australian Age, and afterwards I will point out why this can't reflect the values of say, less than 0.1% of the British Muslim community:The father and uncle of a woman who was brutally murdered for falling in love with the wrong man were sentenced to life in prison in London today.
There are actions that people do entirely in secret--out of fear that others will find out, and you will be shamed. For example, child molesters work very hard to keep what they do a secret--even when they are in prison, surrounded by other felons. There aren't a lot of other really shameful acts anymore (maybe voting Republican in San Francisco), but it wasn't that many years ago that the vast majority of Americans would put considerable effort into keeping it a secret that they had cheated on a spouse, or had a drug addiction or alcoholism problem. Now, as P.J. O'Rourke observed a few years ago, if you call a Hollywood celebrity a drug-addicted philanderer, his response is likely to be, "Thank you for reading my autobiography."
The 2006 murder of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod, 20, who was strangled after two hours of torture and sexual abuse, was the latest in an increasing trend of so-called "honour killings" in Britain, home to about 1.8 million Muslims.
Mahmod was a member of an Iraqi Kurd family which had emigrated to Britain in 1998.
Her father, Mahmod Mahmod, and uncle Ari Mahmod, were sentenced after being found guilty of ordering the killing.
A third man, Mohamad Hama, who had pleaded guilty to taking part in the killing, was sentenced to at least 17 years in prison.
Mahmod's family accused her of shaming them by ending an abusive arranged marriage, becoming too Westernised and falling in love with a man who did not come from their village.
The elder Mahmods ordered the killing after discovering she was having a relationship with an Iranian Kurd.
"This was a barbaric and callous crime," said Judge Brian Barker. "You are hard and unswerving men to whom apparently the respect from the community is more important that your own flesh and blood."
Honor killings are done to earn the respect of other members of the Muslim community--to expiate shame for what their daughter (apparently, never the son) has done. By this fact alone, it tells us that honor killings are considered acceptable or even necessary by some non-trivial fraction of the Muslim community in Britain.
It isn't terribly PC, but there are differences between cultures and religions. Not all religions or cultures are equally valuable or positive. My previous book, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger Press, 1999), dealt with the question of how the back country South's honor culture made for a very ugly and unpleasant place--and how it was eventually replaced with a less savage culture. I don't see any room for Islam in civilized societies until the honor culture that brings these savage acts has been removed.
More Signs We Aren't Serious About Illegal Immigration
I wouldn't make up a story like this from the July 20, 2007 Tennessean, because it would not be believable:An illegal immigrant convicted in a fatal drunk driving wreck in Nashville had been deported from the U.S. three times and allowed to leave voluntarily on eleven other occasions before the accident that claimed the life of a local guitar maker.
What to do in a situation like this? Should we keep him in a U.S. prison for a few years after oh, maybe the seventh or eighth time he is found illegally in the U.S.? Or maybe build a wall, and make a serious attempt at keeping illegals out?
The revelation came during testimony by a federal agent at a sentencing hearing today for Julio Villasana. It was not immediately clear how he managed to re-enter the U.S.
Following the hearing, Villasana, 34, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing Charlie Derrington in the Aug. 1, 2006, wreck.
Derrington was a noted mandolin maker for Gibson Musical Instruments who reconstructed bluegrass legend Bill Monroe's prized instrument. He had been riding his motorcycle on Briley Parkway north of Nashville when he collided with Villasana’s car, which had been traveling in the wrong direction.
Villasana, who at the time lived in Louisville, Ky., fled the scene but was arrested later on suspicion of drunken driving, police said.
Why Hate Crimes Laws Are Worrisome
This article from WorldNetDaily reports on what it costs to express an opinion in Australia:
Idaho Values Coalition points to this closer to home case that shows how much danger hate crimes laws can be:A Canadian pastor is facing a hearing before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission over a letter he wrote to a newspaper condemning homosexuality. Some accuse the pastor's letter of influencing the assault days later of a homosexual teenager.
If a letter condemning homosexuality causes violence against homosexuals, it raises an interesting question. Wasn't there a time that liberals insisted that pornography didn't cause rape? I suspect that the answer in both cases is the same: you can probably find examples of individuals who are highly suggestible for whom what they read or see causes them to respond with violence. But if so, the same rule should apply for both--and liberals certainly aren't going to go for that.
UPDATE: Reader John Wilson writes:Every law undergoes some function creep. The RICO laws have been directed against abortion clinic bombers, and famously the Mann Act, the law that was supposed to stop prostitution, or "white slavery", was applied against Jack Johnson, the famous black boxer who had the temerity to have a white girlfriend, and also to travel across state lines with her, causing a violation of the Mann Act, the transportation of girls across state lines for immoral purposes.
It really is an issue of susceptible minds; after all, Charles Manson got secret messages from the Beatles' "White Album", and "Son of Sam" received secret messages from dogs. Will musicians be called as co-conspirators? Are dogs to be made to stop barking?
And the anti hate speech laws will only be used in one direction. No one will be prosecuted for hate speech against Christians or Jews. "Death to the Jews" is, oddly not hate speech!
Heinlein was right, these are the crazy years.
How to Guarantee a Democratic Victory in 2008
I'm not interested in seeing Rudi Giuliani get the Republican nomination. I will work for Fred Thompson instead. But I see statements like this, and I get very, very worried:I do not believe a pro-choice Republican candidate can win the presidency (Giuliani can win the GOP nomination, but not the general election). This is because, if the Republicans run a pro-choicer, far too many pro-lifers (myself among them) will refuse to vote for him, and either stay home or vote for a third party candidate, thus making it impossible for Giuliani to win the presidency.
A few years back, gun owners self-righteously withheld their votes from George Bush, Senior. I understood their disgust, and I could not develop any enthusiasm for him, either. But the net effect of gun owners refusing to vote for Bush, who was a weak supporter of gun control, was to put in office Bill Clinton--an enthusiastic supporter of gun control.
Personally, there are no circumstances under which I could vote for a candidate who believes it's okay to slice up unborn babies, or puncture the back of their heads with a fork when they are halfway out of the womb.
If Republican voters pick someone like Giuliani, there are going to be two choices in November:
1. A pro-choice Republican.
2. A Democrat. (There's no need to identify that the Democratic candidate will be pro-choice; there's a litmus test for this.)
There is a possibility that Republicans could pressure a pro-choice Republican President to nominate a mixture of pro-life and pro-choice judges to the federal bench. This is not an ideal situation for a pro-life Republican, obviously. But if a Democrat ends up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, any pro-life judge that gets appointed will be an accident.
It is entirely sensible for pro-life Republicans to work very hard to see that a pro-life candidate gets the Republican nomination. I can see why pro-life Republicans might well decide to grudgingly and with great reluctance vote for a pro-choice Republican in the general election. I would not expect them to put money into that candidate's campaign, or make any effort (even at the bumper sticker level) on behalf of that candidate. But if pro-life Republicans in large numbers refuse to pick the lesser of two evils in a general election, they are guaranteeing that the greater of two evils will be President of the United States.
UPDATE: One of my readers points out that if pro-life voters sit out the 2008 election, and a Democrat gets elected, Republicans will have no choice to but to bend to pro-life demands the next time around:A more dynamic analysis would note that how you vote in one election influences the choices you get in the next election. If, for instance, pro-gunners demonstrate to Republicans our willingness to vote for an anti-gun Republican candidate, the rational response by Republican candidates is to become more anti-gun, because this gains them some marginal votes from anti-gunners, but does not lose them our votes. The Democrats then respond by also becoming more anti-gun. And suddenly we're not debating the Lawful Commerce in Firearms act, but instead renewal of the "Assault weapon" ban.
I understand the logic of this. But is letting President Clinton pick the next two or three Supreme Court justices a case of "temporary setback is likely to lead to a permanent loss"? Imagine a Supreme Court that decides that same-sex marriage is Constitutionally mandated, and limiting "hate speech" allows revoking the non-profit status of churches that speak out against homosexuality or abortion. Imagine a Court that rules that freedom of religion does not include the right to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
Of course, how this works out in practice is dependent both on the actual relative numbers in each camp, (If you're a marginal interest group, the rational politician just writes you off instead of trying to win you back.) and whether a temporary setback is likely to lead to a permanent loss. In which case you're trying to lose as slowly as possible, rather than trying to win.
There's also the experimental example. After the 1992 elections, when gun owners to a large extent sat out the elections because Bush Senior was mildly anti-gun, what was the name of that strongly pro-gun candidate that Republicans picked in 1996? I'll bet he just cleaned Clinton's clock! (Oh, that didn't happen?)
Ditto for what happened when gun owners sat out the Dan Lundgren for Governor campaign in California? He was strongly anti-gun. And which strongly pro-gun Republicans have followed him at the top of the ticket?
Sometimes, if you sit out an election, those parts of the Party that don't particularly agree with you anyway have a reason to say, "Why are we worrying what they think? When we needed them, they weren't there for us."
UPDATE 2: Adam Graham thinks I'm missing the reason for this, pointing out that gun control is largely a dead issue now. But unfortunately, not because Republicans learned their lesson--but because Democrats lost the 1994 Congressional elections, by their own admission, largely because they got what they wanted on gun control. What concerns me is Adam's view that:The best possible outcome for our country of a Giuliani nomination is for a conservative third party to emerge that either leads to the GOP going the way of the Whigs or moving the GOP to the right and then disbanding.
There's several problems with this idea:
1. There would need to be enough conservatives to form a third party. There aren't even enough to control the Republican Party with any certainty--or Giuliani wouldn't be a serious Republican candidate for president.
For those of you who think that because evangelical Christians are a majority of the U.S. population that therefore there is a conservative majority--sorry, it doesn't work that way. Much of the evangelical Christian population of the United States isn't terribly conservative. Much of it believes in gay marriage, that homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle, abortion is getting rid of "fetal tissue," and that maybe Islam isn't so different from Christianity. Why? Because they watch television, and this is their major source of information and ideas. (Pastors by and large don't make any effort to correct these points of view.)
2. If the GOP goes the way of the Whigs, the net effect will be to hand over control of the nation to Democrats for perhaps two presidencies, at the end of which there will be either a solid leftist majority on the Supreme Court, or we'll be fighting against Islamists in the streets of America. (The Whigs did elect two presidents, but the Democratic Party was largely in control for most of the period that the Whigs were the "other party.")
3. I like the idea of moving the Republican Party right--but what if the net effect of doing so is to cede the libertarian and liberal wings of the Republican Party to the Democrats?
Callable Bonds: More Interesting Things Learned
As I have previously mentioned, a callable bond is one that the issuer can redeem (force you to sell) at a particular price, on or after a particular date. For example, a bond might have a maturity of November, 2037, but when issued, the bond specifies that it can be called at 100 (par value) on November 1, 2009. Sometimes the call price is above par; often it is at par. And as I discussed before, there is the even more mysterious "Make Whole Call" provision on some bonds.
Well, I am starting to look at long-term bonds, partly because I've got a bit of money sitting in a money market fund that wants a better return, and partly because I think we may be near or at the top of interest rates for a while. I noticed that some of the callable bonds have very high yields. There's a reason for this, and it is important to understand this if you are buying bonds. For example, there is a Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) bond that matures 6/22/2037, with a 6.75% coupon (CUSIP 31398ADR0). The current price is 100.10--just above par. The yield to maturity is 6.742%; the yield to worst (meaning if they call the bond at the worst possible price and date) is 6.689%. The bond can be called as early as 6/22/2009 at a price of 100.0.
So why does a government agency bond (which is almost as safe as a Treasury bond) pay such a high yield? Because Fannie Mae bonds are financing homes. If someone pays off their Fannie Mae mortgage (by refinancing or by sale) early, as often happens, Fannie Mae may end up calling the associated bond. If so, you get the par value of the bond back, and you have enjoyed this very high interest rate for several years.
It is possible that this Fannie Mae bond will not be called before it matures in 2037, but I would not bet on it. Remember that if interest rates come plummeting down, people with mortgages that are financed by this bond will have a strong incentive to refinance their homes, or in the inevitable housing frenzy, they will sell their current home, and pay off the loan. If interest rates go up, it creates an incentive for home owners to keep their current mortgage.
Think of these high yield, low risk, but callable bonds as paying a pretty hefty premium for the high probability that they will be called when interest rates have fallen substantially--and you then have to find a better place to park your money while waiting for interest rates to rise again.
"Beer, Brotherhood, and Guns"
That's the title of an article in the July 23, 2007 Inside Higher Education about gun violence (much of it while drunk) in college fraternities. I wish that I could say that it is all made up, but the fact is that a lot of college students have alcohol problems, and I don't find it hard to believe that the problem is worse in fraternities:A few weeks ago, Yale University undergraduate David Light showed his collection of 11 guns to Christopher Keefer, who was visiting with his brother at the off-campus Beta Theta Pi fraternity house.
My response is very simple: What do the following situations have in common?
Then, at about 3 a.m. on Friday, July 13, gun shots rang out in the house. Keefer, who is in the Air Force, rushed to the living room, where he’d heard the shots. There, according to police reports, he found a visibly intoxicated Light with a gun in his hand and shell casings on a nearby table. Light responded to Keefer’s requests to put the gun down by firing two rounds of blanks at the ceiling and when Keefer tried to convince Light that blanks could also be dangerous, Light allegedly responded, “Why don’t I point it at your head to find out?”
When Light was arrested, a student who had stayed in the house for a few days and who had seen Light with suspicious-looking guns told the Yale Daily News, “it fell into place … I felt foolish that I didn’t tell someone.”
Yale police arrested Light last Monday, charging him with unlawful discharge of a firearm, two counts of illegal possession of assault rifles, reckless endangerment in the first degree, threatening in the second degree and breach of peace in the second degree.
Since the April murders at Virginia Tech, politicians have been talking about the danger of mentally ill students on college campuses. Receiving less attention has been the issue of guns in fraternities, and in some cases, the results have been tragic.
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Al-Qaeda in Iraq Operatives Changing Sides
From the July 23, 2007 Times of London, this encouraging news that you probably won't see on American TV:Fed up with being part of a group that cuts off a person’s face with piano wire to teach others a lesson, dozens of low-level members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are daring to become informants for the US military in a hostile Baghdad neighbourhood.
You can see why the Democrats are trying so hard to withdraw--they are probably in terror that we might win this.
The ground-breaking move in Doura is part of a wider trend that has started in other al-Qaeda hotspots across the country and in which Sunni insurgent groups and tribal sheikhs have stood together with the coalition against the extremist movement.
“They are turning. We are talking to people who we believe have worked for al-Qaeda in Iraq and want to reconcile and have peace,” said Colonel Ricky Gibbs, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which oversees the area.
The sewage-filled streets of Doura, a Sunni Arab enclave in south Baghdad, provide an ugly setting for what US commanders say is al-Qaeda’s last stronghold in the city. The secretive group, however, appears to be losing its grip as a “surge” of US troops in the neighbourhood – part of the latest effort by President Bush to end the chaos in Iraq – has resulted in scores of fighters being killed, captured or forced to flee.
Harry Potter Night
Friday night was the release of the last Harry Potter novel, and the Borders bookstore in Boise asked the pipe and drum band that my wife is in (the Sleekit Beasties) to come and play. It keeps the enormous line of people in good spirits--although it seems that the relevance of bagpipes to Harry Potter is a little remote.
The pictures came from my HP Photosmart, so the darkness was definitely stretching its limits. Due to some miscommunication, some showed up in the band uniform, some in a weird mixture of stuff, and my wife dug out something that might look appropriate at Hogwarths.
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There was a big crowd of Harry Potter fans there, dressed up as characters from the books.
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At this point, I'm sure a few of my readers are scratching their heads about this. Some Christians have decided that the Harry Potter novels are anti-Christian, Satanic, etc. Sorry, but at least from having read the first two with my son, I just don't see it. J.K. Rowling wrote a fantasy--and one that didn't take itself seriously. Owls for mail delivery? Platform 9 3/4? Quidditch?
There have been a lot of books and television shows over the years that have used the idea of the supernatural for laughs. The Bewitched series, for example, was cute and funny in the first couple of seasons. What would it be like to marry someone with supernatural powers? How complicated would it make your life, especially if your mother-in-law wasn't just a typical mother-in-law, but was a witch? Then it started to elaborate on the "hidden world" of witchcraft, took itself too seriously, and just became stupid.
Other dramatic efforts have used the supernatural as a metaphor. The series Forever Knight made in Canada 1989-1996 was one of the more interesting ones because of the obvious parallels it drew between the world of vampires and pre-Stonewall homosexuality. (You don't have to agree with all of my assumptions below about homosexuality to see how strong the parallels were in Forever Knight.)
1. There were vampire bars--although the living might enter and just think it was a very decadent place.
2. No one chose to be a vampire--indeed, they were victims of vampires, but once in that state, there seemed to be no way out.
3. The vampires were estranged from everything Christian, reveling in their decadence, with a much stronger erotic undertone than in living society.
4. There were no long-term, stable family relationships because vampires can't have children--they can only "recruit" new vampires into the community by biting and infecting them.
5. It was a culture obsessed with staying forever young.
6. At least some of the vampires, like the hero, Nick Knight, have regular jobs, but they have to keep their private life in the closet.
7. Nick is working with a doctor to become human again, drinking animal blood, and trying to resist his vampiric urges--reparative therapy, so to speak, for the undead!
Now, there are definitely books that promote the idea of witchcraft as something serious. Where we lived in California, you could find stacks of books in bookstores that were entirely serious about this--and since this was a county filled with rich people desperate for spirituality (as long as they didn't have to change their immoral behavior), New Age, Wicca, witchcraft, "Old Religion," Satanism, and often bizarrely electic mixtures of these with Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism were very common--more common, as near as I could tell, than all branches of Judaism and Christianity combined.
This is the hazard that Christians should worry about--not some charmingly sweet books that clearly put witchcraft and wizardry in the realm of make believe. And besides, the Harry Potter books get kids to read. That's a good thing.
