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Labels: Idaho politics Labels: freedom of speech, homosexuality Labels: child sexual abuse U.S. Rep. Brian Baird said Thursday that his recent trip to Iraq convinced him the military needs more time in the region, and that a hasty pullout would cause chaos that helps Iran and harms U.S. security. "I believe that the decision to invade Iraq and the post-invasion management of that country were among the largest foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation. I voted against them, and I still think they were the right votes," Baird said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. "But we're on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work." Baird, a five-term Democrat, voted against President Bush ordering the Iraq invasion — at a time when he was in a minority in Congress and at risk of alienating voters. He returned late Tuesday from a trip that included stops in Israel, Jordan and Iraq, where he met troops, U.S. advisers and Iraqis, whose stories have convinced him that U.S. troops must stay longer. With Congress poised next month to look at U.S. progress in Iraq and a vote looming on U.S. funding for the war, Baird said he's inclined to seek a continued U.S. presence in Iraq beyond what many impatient Americans want. He also expects Gen. David Petraeus, who oversees U.S. troops in Iraq, to seek a redeployment of forces. "People may be upset. I wish I didn't have to say this," Baird said. He added that the United States needs to continue with its military troops surge "at least into early next year, then engage in a gradual redeployment. … I know it's going to cost hundreds of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars." It was Baird's fifth trip to the Middle East, and he conceded that what he has learned has put him again in an unpopular position with some voters. He no longer thinks partitioning Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd sections is possible, for instance; no one he spoke to in Israel, Jordan, Palestinian cities or Iraq liked the idea, he added. Labels: terrorism Armstrong fired Paquin from a position teaching global studies at the end of the spring semester amid concerns that his lessons were too radical and undermined the school's commitment to the free enterprise system. Paquin assigned works by Jim Wallis, who writes from the Christian left, and Peter Singer, an atheist and animal rights activist. Armstrong won't discuss Paquin's case specifically, but he says free enterprise is fundamental to the school's philosophy. "I don't think there is another system that is more consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ," Armstrong said. That doesn't mean socialists can't be good Christians, and a belief in free enterprise is not linked to salvation, Armstrong added. But free enterprise is the message of Colorado Christian, he said. "What the university stands for, among other things, is free markets." Paquin said he assigned books from various viewpoints to challenge students with ideas they had not encountered before. "I wanted my left-leaning, my right-leaning, my centrist, radical — whatever — students to at least give ear and respect to perspectives other than their own," he said. Labels: political correctness Labels: constitutional history, due process, freedom of religion, intelligent design CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers. The charity says it will phase out its use of the practice by 2009. But it has already deeply divided the world of food aid and has spurred growing criticism of the practice as Congress considers a new farm bill. “If someone wants to help you, they shouldn’t do it by destroying the very thing that they’re trying to promote,” said George Odo, a CARE official who grew disillusioned with the practice while supervising the sale of American wheat and vegetable oil in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Under the system, the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year. Labels: economics, foreign aid Labels: machining Labels: machining Labels: Idaho politics Labels: Idaho politics Labels: immigration, terrorism Labels: gun rights A measure to end the sale of alcohol in Athens is up for a citywide vote, a rare instance where voters could overturn a previous vote to allow sales. "Economic impact is really the big issue," said Carl Hunt, an Labels: gun rights Not all station errors lead to positive steps. There is a bimodal distribution of errors reported earlier at CA here , with many stations having negative steps. There is a positive skew so that the impact of the step error is about 0.15 deg C according to Hansen. However, as you can see from the distribution, the impact on the majority of stations is substantially higher than 0.15 deg. For users of information regarding individual stations, the changes may be highly relevant. GISS recognized that the error had a significant impact on individual stations and took rapid steps to revise their station data (and indeed the form of their revision seems far from ideal indicating the haste of their revision.) GISS failed to provide any explicit notice or warning on their station data webpage that the data had been changed, or an explicit notice to users who had downloaded data or graphs in the past that there had been significant changes to many U.S. series. This obligation existed regardless of any impact on world totals. These revelations resulted in a variety of aggressive counter-attacks in the climate blogosphere, many of which argued that, while these individual sites may be contaminated, the “expert” software at GISS and NOAA could fix these problems, as, for example here . they [NOAA and/or GISS] can “fix” the problem with math and adjustments to the temperature record. This assumes that contaminating influences can’t be and aren’t being removed analytically.. I haven’t seen anyone saying such influences shouldn’t be removed from the analysis. However I do see professionals saying “we’ve done it” “Fixing” bad data with software is by no means an easy thing to do (as witness Mann’s unreported modification of principal components methodology on tree ring networks.) The GISS adjustment schemes (despite protestations from Schmidt that they are “clearly outlined”) are not at all easy to replicate using the existing opaque descriptions. For example, there is nothing in the methodological description that hints at the change in data provenance before and after 2000 that caused the Hansen error. Because many sites are affected by climate change, a general urban heat island effect and local microsite changes, adjustment for heat island effects and local microsite changes raises some complicated statistical questions, that are nowhere discussed in the underlying references (Hansen et al 1999, 2001). In particular, the adjustment methods are not techniques that can be looked up in statistical literature, where their properties and biases might be discerned. They are rather ad hoc and local techniques that may or may not be equal to the task of “fixing” the bad data. Making readers run the gauntlet of trying to guess the precise data sets and precise methodologies obviously makes it very difficult to achieve any assessment of the statistical properties. In order to test the GISS adjustments, I requested that GISS provide me with details on their adjustment code. They refused. Nevertheless, there are enough different versions of U.S. station data (USHCN raw, USHCN time-of-observation adjusted, USHCN adjusted, GHCN raw, GHCN adjusted) that one can compare GISS raw and GISS adjusted data to other versions to get some idea of what they did. Labels: global warming Labels: terrorism Labels: history Labels: my books Labels: deinstitutionalization
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BinkyBoy Has Escalated From Random Personal Insults...
to libel and false accusations of criminal behavior. After recounting some claims about Minutemen shooting at illegal aliens (which I don't find impossible to believe, except that they would have been on every news show), he blames Bryan Fischer, Rep. Tom Tancredo, and me for this, and includes this amazing claim:No one will benefit from this escalation. This will only result in more deaths. Good job, right wing xenophobes that peddle in hate speech, others are about to reap from what you have sown.
Huh? I've never threatened anyone with a gun, much less BinkyBoy. Such a threat is a criminal offense. BinkyBoy needs to either confess that this is entirely in his head, or file a criminal complaint. Then we can see him go to jail for filing a false report.
Maybe for all of this Clayton will threaten me with his guns some more.
But he is an Idaho Democrat. Why argue real points, when you can just make up lies?
UPDATE: Another Idaho blogger tells me that he once tried to have a polite conversation by email with BinkyBoy, and the response was to use the b-word and threaten him with violence if they ever met. From this I can draw two likely inferences:
1. BinkyBoy has a serious violence problem, and is projecting his own threats of violence against others onto me.
2. Have you ever heard of a straight man calling another man the b-word?
UPDATE 2: This news account indicates that the videotape that BinkyBoy talks about of the Minutemen shooting an illegal immigrant is a fake:CAMPO, Calif. -- One Minuteman leader accused a rival Minuteman leader of videotaping the shooting of an illegal immigrant, but sheriff's deputies investigating the report Saturday said the video was fake, as did the maker of the video.
And stupid, too.
Robert "Little Dog" Crooks, leader of the Campo Minutemen, said he and his friends did shoot the video and sheriff's deputies came out to see what happened, but they know him well.
"Who in their right mind is going to shoot a smuggler, videotape it, then post it to YouTube?" Crooks said.
The video came to the attention of authorities after Jeff Schwilk, founder of the San Diego Minutemen, who Crooks said is his rival, e-mailed another border activist, warning about the Crooks video, according to a local newspaper.
The video, which is shot from the perspective of a gun scope, was probably staged, said Sgt. Mike Radovich of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department Campo station.
The video shows Minutemen targeting an illegal immigrant crossing the border. There's the sound of a gunshot, the immigrant ducks or is shot, and then the video fades out to a grave site, Radovich said.
Crooks gave a similar description of his video. He said he and his friends made the video when the Minutemen were bored discussing President George W. Bush's federal immigration reform bill, which the group calls the Amnesty Bill, and which was eventually turned down by Congress.
"The Amnesty Bill was up in the air, and we said if it goes through it'd bury America," Crooks said. "So we buried America."
The group constructed the fake grave site next to Crooks' trailer, which is near the border fence in Campo, he said. Radovich said he saw the fake grave site during his investigation of the video.
"We're old men and we're bored," Crooks said.
UPDATE 3: The more I look into BinkyBoy's obssessions, the more the use of the b-word explains a lot--such as BinkyBoy's freakout about how an Idaho Statesman reporter used a police report.
BinkyBoy needs to move to San Francisco.
If You Put This Book On The Same Shelf With Heather Has Two Mommies
Would you get the philosophical equivalent of a matter/anti-matter explosion? Would both books be mutually annihilated with a burst of X-rays?
It is interesting that the book combines two different explanations of homosexuality--one a traditional view (strong mother, weak or emotionally absent father), the other an explanation based on the disproportionate reporting of child sexual abuse by adult homosexuals.
I find the book (at least the sample pages shown here) to be simplistic because there may well be multiple causes of homosexuality. The fact that there does seem to be a weak genetic factor in homosexuality suggests that there might be a genetic predisposition towards it. The disproportionate child sexual abuse reporting by adult homosexuals could indicate that both the predisposition and the victimization are required--or perhaps these could be two different, unrelated factors that both lead to homosexuality. (Obviously, most sexual abuse victims don't become homosexuals--the surveys that I have read would suggest that about 1/3 of girls and about 9% of boys are sexually abused.)
Still, this book doesn't appear to be anymore propagandistic and simplistic than other books aimed at children that discuss homosexuality. Wouldn't it be entertaining if school districts started to include this book in their curriculum? At least, it would be amusing to watch the ACLU file suit to get this book removed from the public schools, while insisting that parents had no right to have Heather Has Two Mommies or Hello Sailor or King and King.
UPDATE: A reader asked if he had misread (or I had miswritten) above where I indicated that about "1/3 of girls and about 9% of boys are sexually abused" or if that referred only to the percentage of homosexuals who had been sexually abused. No, sorry, but as I pointed out several years ago:First of all, it's important to recognize that until the late 1970s, child molestation was regarded as a rare, bizarre, and unusual phenomenon--how shockingly common it was just wasn't recognized. Even today, many people are startled to find out how large the percentages are of children who are sexually abused. The data that I have is somewhat dated--but then again, before Political Correctness had taken over the field.
Surveys of homosexuals report substantially higher rates of sexual abuse as children than these shocking and disturbing numbers. If there is a causal connection between sexual abuse as a child, and adult homosexuality, it is not surprising that homosexuals have higher rates of substance abuse and what anecdotally seems like abnormally high rates of dysfunctional behavior relative to straight people.
How many victims of childhood sexual abuse are there? A variety of surveys have been conducted, using a variety of methodologies, none of which can be considered perfect. Many of the studies before 1990 were conducted among college students, and so tend to leave out those victims of child sexual abuse who fail to reach college because of their problems. [Christopher Bagley and Kathleen King, Child Sexual Abuse: The Search for Healing, (New York, Tavistock/Routledge: 1990), 69-70.]
The range of the 11 studies summarized in Bagley & King are 12%-40% of females, and 3%-8.6% of males.[Bagley and King, 76] Faller quotes the same studies, though in less detail. [Kathleen Coulborn Faller, Child Sexual Abuse: An Interdisciplinary Manual for Diagnosis, Case Management, and Treatment, (New York, Columbia University Press: 1988), 150] The Everstines use the figures 15%-45% of females and 3%-9% of males, but "believe that the currently accepted percentages for males who have been molested will be revised to 10% or 15% of the population when more accurate data are forthcoming." [Diana Sullivan Everstine and Louis Everstine, Sexual Trauma in Children and Adolescents: Dynamics and Treatment, (New York, Brunner/Mazel Publishers: 1989), 2] These studies were conducted in Britain, Canada, and the United States, with Bagley and King asserting that child sexual abuse survey reports in California are unusually high, though it is unclear whether this is a methodological problem, or reflects higher incidence in California. [Bagley & King, 69]
Another problem is that we really don't know how accurate our sampling methodology is. Boys who are molested may be less willing to report it than girls because there is a homosexuality shame associated with their victimization. There may also be more repression of memories among boys for this same reason.
You Can Tell Wisconsin is a Very Liberal Place
In Idaho, I think this woman would have been given an award, not arrested. From the August 17, 2007 Minneapolis Star-Tribune:SHEBOYGAN, Wis. — A Sheboygan woman stabbed a 17-year-old several times with a kitchen knife after learning he had sexually assaulted her 8-year-old daughter.
If I were reviewing the case, I would be asking the woman, "So, how did you exercise enough self-control to let this pervert get away alive, considering what he was trying to do to your daughter?"
Sheboygan police released new details about the case Friday after arresting the woman a day earlier. Initial reports indicated the woman stabbed the boy to stop the assault.
The teen remained hospitalized with arm and leg wounds, Lt. Jeff Johnston said.
A 30-year-old man discovered the teen assaulting the girl Thursday and struck him with a shovel, house fan and other objects as he pulled him from the child's bedroom, according to the statement police released Friday.
The girl's mother and her boyfriend came into the apartment to stop the fight and only later learned what it was about. When the woman and teen were alone, she picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed him several times, the statement said.
She was arrested but has not yet been formally charged with a crime. Sheboygan County District Attorney Joe DeCecco is reviewing the case.
Oh yeah, the creep in question has a history of pursuing underage sorts:The teen, who is related to some of the people who live in the apartment, was arrested last fall for having sex with a child under age 16, detective Matt Walsh said. He received a deferred prosecution agreement that would likely be voided if he was charged with another crime.
I risk being called names by Idaho's progressive bloggers, and doubtless, some of the crowd that hangs around Volokh Conspiracy will be screaming for justice for this poor, oppressed 17 year old, but I am hard pressed to see why the mother was arrested at all.
UPDATE: More about this here.
A Democrat Who Voted Against The War in 2002...
Now says that we shouldn't withdraw. This is a remarkable statement, from the August 17, 2007 Olympian:
Pretty clearly, this guy isn't the average Democrat; he took what I would call a wrong but courageous position in 2002 when he voted against the AUMF; he's taking a courageous position now when he says that the war was a mistake, but premature withdrawal would be a bigger mistake.
It's unfortunate that too many Democrats are like Pelosi and Reid--strictly concerned with getting and keeping power by following whatever the current mood of the electorate is. That takes no courage at all.
Thanks to Captain's Quarters for bringing this to my attention.
Fed Cuts Discount Rate!
Yahoo! My current plans are to sell my spare house next summer, and interest rates need to drop a bit to get the Boise housing market out of its doldrums.
As near as I can tell, part of what put the Boise housing market into a buying frenzy a couple of years ago wasn't just lower interest rates making it easier for locals to buy houses, but that lower interest rates meant that people in California (among other places) were able to sell crummy little houses at prices that just take your breath away. This meant that they could move here, buy a really nice house, and not have to worry about having to subject their children to public schools that are probably getting ready to scrap Heather Has Two Mommies for Heather Has Two Mommies, Three Daddies, One Indeterminate, And Two Interspecial Parental Units.
Is There More To This Story?
The August 17, 2007 Inside Higher Education had this story that disturbed me, and makes me wonder if there's a bit more to what happened:When Colorado Christian University notified Andrew Paquin, an assistant professor of global studies, that his contract would not be renewed, he knew that not being sufficiently guided by Christ wasn’t the problem. But it might have been that he wasn’t sufficiently capitalist.
I read the August 13, 2007 Rocky Mountain News story as well, looking for some indication that there's more to the story, but what I found sounds disturbingly like Colorado Christian University is a mirror image of many of the top tier secular universities:
“Throughout the process it became evident that the issue of capitalism, the use of a couple of different books were at the core” of President William L. Armstrong’s “discomfort” with him, Paquin said. Those included works by animal-rights ethicist Peter Singer and Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and The Left Doesn’t Get It. Once Paquin was notified that he couldn’t continue on as a professor, students, faculty and alumni started petitions and contacted The Rocky Mountain News, which broke the story this week and sparked a torrent of anger on the blogosphere.
I'm very skeptical that there are many students who make it to college who haven't been incessantly exposed to the leftist critique of capitalism. (Maybe the homes without televisions.) If Paquin was presenting only one side, that might be a valid basis for his dismissal. (Or for tenure at a public university.)
I would love to hear more about the basis for Paquin's dismissal. Right now, it doesn't sound good for CCU.
Conformity
Imagine if Tennessee required private schools to teach Creationism, that homosexuality is a sin, and if you enrolled your kids in schools that didn't teach those things, the state would take your kids away. But this account is just the other direction, so I expect progressive sorts will back this up:Fifteen Christian families from a tiny community of only about 1,300 people are making plans to leave their homes and work behind so that their children will not be forced by the Canadian government to attend "sanctioned" schools where evolution is taught.
There's a few things about Mennonite beliefs that I don't agree with--for example, their pacifism. (Unlike progressives, however, they aren't prepared to send out government agents with guns to force their pacifism on others.)
A report in the Vancouver Sun said provincial officials have threatened the families with legal action, including the potential loss of their children to state control, if they do not abide by the mandatory education curriculum.
But leaders of the Mennonite families say they'll leave Quebec before giving up their children to the state indoctrination.
...
The Mennonites, whose forefathers broke away from the reforms of Martin Luther because they were not radical enough and adopted several distinctive practices including adult baptism, established their own school in the community a few years after they arrived. Last year eight children were enrolled in grades 1-7, and this year 11 students were expected.
Children are taught reading, writing, math, science, geography, social sciences and music, as well as English and French.
But they didn't use the government-mandated curriculum that includes the teachings of evolution, and other subjects to which parents objected. So authorities warned the parents they would face legal proceedings if their children were not enrolled in "sanctioned" schools this fall.
Goossen said the 30 parents and children in families who would be endangered will move immediately; the rest of the group will follow shortly later.
Officials said in addition to the issue of the curriculum, the teacher at the Mennonite school was not "certified."
"To do that, we would have to send teachers to schools we don't want to send our children to," Goossen said.
"We don't agree with the emphasis on evolution, which we consider false; we don't like the morality standards; and we don't like the acceptance of alternative lifestyles," he said.
I also think that it puts kids at a terrible disadvantage if they don't learn about evolution. For all the evidence that evolution is a bit oversold by its priests, it is a good operating model for understanding biology, and you can't seriously criticize a theory that you don't fully understand.
There is also a pretty strong argument that a modern society can't operate if large fractions of the population aren't receiving some minimal level of education, and this is perhaps a good argument for requiring that parents get their kids educated. In a fair number of big cities, you can see the consequences of this, where the combination of destructive subcultures and public schools that don't work produce large populations of high school graduates who can barely read--and a fair number who can't read at all.
Still, when the government threatens to take your children because you won't put them in public schools, or requires them to attend private schools that teach a particular curriculum, this is totalitarianism--and far more dangerous than a tiny minority of dissenters who won't go along with the totalitarian program.
The KKK relied on this totalitarian technique when it persuaded Oregon to pass a ban on private schooling early in the 20th century. Fortunately, those evil strict constructionists on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), relying on the precedent in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), which struck down a Nebraska law that prohibited teaching children in languages other than English. The decision recognized that parent have a right to decide whom to employ to teach their children--and in what language--and this statute violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Canada has some very strong totalitarian tendencies. Doubtless this is why progressive sorts worship it so strongly.
The Proof That Greed Is A Disease
This August 16, 2007 Bloomberg news story about a defense contractor that charged the Pentagon $998,798 to ship two 19 cent washers:Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.
The news story goes on to explain that they started out small, but apparently figured out that no one was actually looking at the bills, and kept ramping up the shipping charges to this absurd level.
The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.
The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina -- twin sisters -- exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled ``priority'' were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.
C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.
Corley, 46, was fined $750,000. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced soon, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year.
If they had been content with charging say, $100 to ship 38 cents worth of parts, how long might they have gotten away with this? Even to our government, almost a million dollars is a significant item, and is going to cause someone to ask, "What's going on here?" But greed is a disease--you can never make enough money when greed is running your life.
How Help Hurts
This article from the August 18, 2007 New York Times describes what isn't exactly news; that certain types of well-intentioned aid can actually hurt the Third World:MALELA, Kenya — CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.
As I said, this isn't exactly news. I think I remember learning something like this in Mr. Richards' Government class in 12th grade. There are certainly times when providing food aid is entirely a positive--for example, during a famine, when the local farmers can't produce enough food to prevent starvation.
On a regular basis, however, it makes a country dependent on that food aid, and discourages local production. Thus, farmers who might have made a living growing food for sale to their countrymen find themselves being undercut by subsidized American wheat.
One of the organizations that defends the practice in the article is World Vision, who I fund. While World Vision does distribute food, they also make efforts to buy food from local producers, and they fund various development activities intended to bolster the local economy. For example, they fund the drilling of wells to provide safe water, and engage in microcapitalism, such as lending money to a family to buy livestock for breeding.
I should have thought of this before, but I do find myself wondering if part of why black Africa is the basket case of the world is because so much European and American guilt about Africa caused us to give too much of this type of destructive aid. (Of course, the thugs in charge of many African countries certainly play a part as well.)
Do I Remember My Geometry and Trigonometry Sufficiently?
Thanks to all for the corrections. The core error was that the bounding square around a regular hexagon--is a rectangle!
What Is the World Coming To?
I went to buy a 27/64" drill and a 1/2"-13 tap at the Ace Hardware in Eagle a couple days ago--and to my shock and amazement, they were both made in the USA! Very nice! And they weren't even hideously priced!
Unfortunately, I needed the 1/2"-13 tap because I am about to start using a German-made caster assembly from Rhombus. It is a precision bearing with zero motion when it is locked--a recurring complaint from customers who find a few hundredths of an inch of play to be a problem.
Idaho Democrats
I generally ignore people whose notion of political argument is mixing personal insults and foul language. Snowflakes in Hell noticed the 43rd State Blues blog:I may have my disagreements with Clayton on a lot of social issues, but if this is what passes for reasoned discourse among Idaho progressives, no wonder it’s a Republican dominated state. I sincerely hope this site isn’t run by grown adults.
I won't quote what 43rd State Blues has to say about me--I won't use that kind of language. As 43rd State Blues explains on the masthead:Idaho's Families
43rd State Blues doesn't claim to be a spokesblog for the Idaho Democratic Party, but it is certainly one of the largest blogs devoted to Democratic Party politics in Idaho. I would hope that the Democratic Party would be so embarrassed by it that they would explicitly reject any connection to it--but perhaps they don't have a problem with it.
Idaho's Future
Idaho's Democrats
UPDATE: I was actually expecting that some of the other Idaho Democratic blogs would take the high road and suggest that 43rd State Blues might be better off focusing on substantive criticism instead of insults and pseudo-psychological analysis of gun ownership. But no, The Unequivocal Notion defends the childish behavior and foul language of 43rd State Blues.
I've been assuming that 43rd State Blues was just the problem of one very immature person. But I am beginning to think it might be a progressive thing.
The Philosophy of Planning & Zoning
When I was younger, I found grand ideas and principles mesmerizing. The older I have become, the more I have seen that grand ideas and principles can often be very useful models, but the complexity of the real world and the variability of human abilities and foibles often means that a strict adherence to ideas--any ideas--can lead to silly or destructive results.
Land use, planning, zoning is one such example. As a grand idea, I don't think there should be restrictions on how you use your land, except those that you voluntarily accept as part of deed restrictions. If there is a problem of external effects (pollution, traffic, noise), well, injured parties should file suit against the polluter. If someone can figure out how to operate a slaughterhouse in a residential neighborhood without smells, noise, offal, then why should anyone care?
I can imagine a way that this could work--with underground tunnels bringing in cattle and sending out steaks, big air filtration systems to deal with the smells, lots of sound insulation, and little nuclear reactor in the basement to power everything. If this sounds like something out of L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach (1981), now available online as a graphic novel--well, that's my point. Lots of things are possible in a science fiction novel, but the real world tends to be a bit more difficult.
In practice, the external effects are sometimes so horrendous that damages after the fact can't compensate for the injuries. For example, if a lead smelting operation pollutes the ground water and air, causing birth defects in dozens of kids. Yes, you can buy the silence of the families, but the damage done to those kids is permanent, and unrepairable.
Sometimes the external effects are so minor from any single property owner that it simply does not make sense to file suit. How much air pollution does a single property owner burning trash upwind from you make? Not much--and it is impractical to file suit against that one owner. But if thousands are doing so, the cumulative effect is quite destructive--but the cost of filing suit against thousands of trash burners--especially when you can't identify each and every one of them--just makes this an absurd exercise.
When I was younger, most of what I saw of planning and zoning was in the Los Angeles basin--where the level of detail and control being exerted made libertarian ideas about this quite attractive. Since I moved to Idaho, what I have generally seen of the planning process is a lot of people making genuine attempts to resolve real world problems. You might have a philosophical objection to the process, but questions of traffic flow, blocking of sunlight, adequate parking within a development--I just haven't seen a lot of completely absurd concerns or solutions for most development proposals up here. As long as we are discussing relatively unemotional matters such as traffic, noise, property values, you can get have a polite and reasonably intelligent conversation.
But when it comes to personal safety--the NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) goes ballistic. As I've mentioned with respect to Booth House, a homeless family shelter in Boise, and this recent situation near Idaho City with Alamar Ranch, there's a lot of fear--and intelligent conversation seems to stop.
Alamar Ranch Again
I've mentioned previously the controversy about Alamar Ranch, a residential treatment school that is trying to set up operations in a rural part of Boise County. Some of the neighbors don't want it there.
Last night, my wife, my daughter, and I attended the second Boise County Planning & Zoning Commission hearing about this. The neighbors hired an attorney to represent their interests. I am sure that he thought he was being slick and effective at manipulation.* I find it hard to believe the Commission was stupid enough to be taken in by his tactics--but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit. They did finally vote 3-3 (one commissioner recused himself) on the request for a Conditional Use Permit--which means that Alamar Ranch now has to appeal to the County Board of Commissioners.
There were some genuine concerns that opponents of Alamar Ranch expressed--problems about traffic, fire protection, dark skies, and the possible impact on the local school district if any of the troubled teens demanded the public school district create an IEP (as federal law requires). Alamar Ranch responded to each of these concerns in a manner that I would consider appropriate.
The local fire district wanted there to be enough water to supply 1500 gallons per minute for two hours. Fine: Alamar Ranch agreed to build a 200,000 gallon lake. They also wanted a second emergency access road into the property, because the bridge that currently provides access was under water in 1996. Fine: Alamar Ranch isn't exactly sure where the second access road is going to be, but they were prepared to make that part of the Conditional Use Permit--getting this second access road completed and available for emergency vehicles.
Dark skies: they agreed first to use full cutoff light fixtures outside, and at the meeting last night, they agreed to conform to the International Dark Sky Association Simple Guidelines for Lighting Ordinances--something that no other development in Boise County has to do. (I suggested during a break to one of the Planning & Zoning Commissioners that this would be a good thing to require for all other new developments in the county--and he thought that this was a good idea.)
The school district IEP issue: Alamar Ranch explained that because they were going to be doing all the schooling, none of their clients would be making requests on the district, and agreed to put in writing that they would pay any costs that the district incurred because of their clients. They also agreed to kick in $500 per employee pupil that ended up in the district. (Remember that schools are largely funded by property taxes, so this is in addition to what the district will get from employees buying homes in Boise County.)
The opponents claimed that Alamar Ranch would create traffic problems. Alamar Ranch pointed out that if the 135 acres they own were subdivided, it would have about 60 homes on it--and that would cause even more traffic. (Remember that the clients who will be there won't have cars, and can't leave the property.)
The real issue is fear of crime. The neighbors are convinced that these troubled teens (whom Alamar will not accept if they have felony convictions, sex crime histories, or histories of violence) will run away, break into their homes, rape their women, steal their cars, and kill the locals. I'm not exaggerating--that's essentially what the lawyer who represented them at the hearing last night said was going to happen--not might happen, but would.
Now, if this were an open campus, with the troubled teens free to come and go as they please, I guess I could understand a bit of the fear. Teen boys under the best of conditions have some antisocial tendencies, and troubled teen boys are likely to be even more more so. This isn't an open campus, however. It's a very controlled setting precisely because these are troubled teens. Boise County has experience with similar facilities; Project Patch, in Garden Valley, does something similar. One of the Planning & Zoning Commissioners said that they were neighbors, and it was many years before he was even aware that Project Patch was there, and what they did. He also made the point that he was more impressed with the behavior of the kids from Project Patch than of the local kids.
I am not surprised that the Planning & Zoning Commission tied on this. The opponents of Alamar Ranch definitely outnumber the supporters, and I noticed that the farther away the Commissioners were from this part of Boise County, the more willing they were to support Alamar Ranch's Conditional Use Permit. This is the downside of democracy; the prejudices of the neighbors take precedence over property rights. As much as I find Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc. (1985) offensive for how the courts decided to simply overturn majority rule, I understand the temptation. Much like the case in Cleburne, this is prejudice with little factual basis behind it.
The only consolation is that some of the statements made by the Planning & Zoning Commissioners who voted against the CUP strike me as providing a valid basis under Idaho law for overturning their decision. As the county attorney reminded the commissioners before their vote, "You are operating as a quasi-judicial body, not a quasi-legislative body." In short, he was reminding them that they needed to make their decision based on the facts of the case, not based on what a majority wants.
As an example, one of the commissioners who voted against claimed that there was no way for Boise County to monitor compliance by Alamar Ranch with the Conditional Use Permit stipulations. "We don't even have a way to make sure our existing CUPs are complied with." But the county attorney had carefully explained to the commissioners a few minutes before that there was no need to have the county's prosecutor involved; if the Planning & Zoning Commission became aware of a violation of the conditions (for example, if one of the upset neighbors found such evidence), the Commission could revoke the CUP the following week by just a simple vote. So the commissioner would appear to have been just looking for an excuse to vote against, and came up with a factually incorrect reason to do so.
*The attorney quoted the "I know when I see it" line about pornography, and attributed it to Justice Story. I knew that was wrong. It's actually from Justice Stewart Potter in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964):I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
UPDATE: My daughter's remarks were, as usual, a bit more concise.
My Brain Hurts From Reading This
Mark Steyn claims that:Being gay isn't exactly one of those jobs Canadians won't do.
He then links to an August 13, 2007 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news story that reads like satire:A young Nicaraguan man who says he fears he will be killed in his home country because of his sexual orientation has gone into hiding in Toronto after his latest bid to stay in Canada failed.
The news story itself tells you why they didn't believe him, and I must confess, it doesn't sound like he's being very straight with Canadian Immigration about his motivation for wanting to live in Canada. According to Steyn:
Alvaro Orozco, 22, has been holed up at a friend's place since Thursday, when his refugee claim was denied, but came out briefly over the weekend to speak to CBC News.
"Most of the time, I'm hiding because I'm not supposed to be anywhere. I feel like a fugitive. It's really bad," said Orozco.
His case made headlines in Canada and Nicaragua in February when the Immigration and Refugee Board denied him asylum saying they didn't believe he was gay.Ahmed Ressam, the famous "Millennium Bomber" arrested at the British Columbia/Washington State border en route to blow up LAX, was admitted to Canada because he told them he was a convicted Algerian terrorist.
That's right: As Mme Shouldice of the immigration service explained, being a terrorist was a legitimate criterion for admission, on the grounds that you had a reasonable fear of being ill-treated if you returned to the country where you were trying to blow people up.
Tragedy And A Lesson
One of the arguments that gun control advocates often use for why police officers aren't subject to the same restrictions on gun ownership as civilians is how much better trained police are. One of the big problems with this claim is that a lot of civilians actually have received comparable or better training, and there are police officers who must have been adequately trained, but sure don't show it. This article from the August 15, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle gives yet another sad example:The San Francisco rookie police officer who accidentally shot himself to death fired his weapon while displaying for a female friend how officers are taught to avoid having their guns used against them, law enforcement authorities said Tuesday.
If this guy had been on the force for 15 years, you might argue that he forgot his training. But Gustafson was pretty fresh out of the academy. You would think that he would know this. Even before I had any formal training with firearms, I knew that you have to check the chamber--removing the magazine isn't enough.
The incident happened at 1:40 a.m. Saturday during a gathering of as many as 15 people at the San Mateo apartment of the 23-year-old officer, James Gustafson Jr.
According to those familiar with the incident, Gustafson was showing his Police Department-issued semiautomatic pistol after removing the clip that stores the rounds. He explained that there are ways an officer can disable a weapon in close proximity to keep it from being fired.
It apparently was part of a demonstration of the department's "weapons retention" procedures. However, there was still a bullet in the chamber.
Gustafson pointed the weapon at his neck and pulled the trigger, shooting himself, according to authorities.
San Francisco Police Department policy is never to point a gun at a target that an officer does not intend to shoot, authorities said.
Athens, Alabama Considers Alcohol Ban
From August 14, 2007 Associated Press:
Business interests are against repeal, but church leaders who helped organize the petition drive that got the measure on the ballot are asking members to pray and fast in support of a ban.
Christians who oppose drinking on moral grounds believe they have a chance to win, however small.
"If it can be voted out anywhere, it will be here because so many Christians are against it," said Teresa Thomas, who works in a Christian book store.
Business leaders argue that ending the sale of beer, wine and liquor would hurt tax revenues and send the message that Athens is backward.
organizer of the pro-alcohol sale Citizens for Economic Progress.
The news story also mentioned that Barrow, Alaska had banned alcohol at one point:Such "wet-to-dry" votes aren't unheard of, but they're rare, said Jim Mosher of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, which tracks public policy issues including alcohol laws.
I did a small amount of searching, and found this abstract from a Journal of the American Medical Association article about Barrow:
"In Barrow, Alaska, when they legalized alcohol sales, problems went through the roof," Mosher said. "Then, when they banned it again, it improved."CONTEXT: Community availability of alcohol affects alcohol consumption patterns and alcohol-related health and social problems. In Barrow, Alaska, an isolated community at the northernmost reaches of the United States, during a 33-month period, possession and importation of alcohol were legal, completely banned, made legal again, and then banned again.
This must have been a quite remarkable political struggle--to have it legal, then banned, made legal again, then banned again--all in 33 months! It also provided a nearly perfect opportunity to do a statistical evaluation of short-lived changes in behavior.
OBJECTIVE: To determine the impact of these public policy changes on alcohol-related outpatient visits at the area hospital.
DESIGN: Retrospective review of outpatient records; time-series analysis of alcohol-related visits with respect to community alcohol policy.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Total monthly outpatient visits for alcohol-related problems.
RESULTS: There was a substantial decrease in the number of alcohol-related outpatient visits when the ban on possession and importation was imposed compared with baseline. When the ban was lifted, outpatient visits increased; when the ban was reimposed, the number of outpatient visits again decreased. Interrupted time-series analyses confirm that the alcohol ban, its lifting, and its reimposition had a statistically significant and negative effect on the number of alcohol-related outpatient visits (P<.05).
CONCLUSION: In a geographically isolated community, the prohibition of alcohol can be an effective public health intervention, reducing the health problems associated with alcohol use.
THis many changes in 33 months is too rapid to measure long-term changes in behavior. For example, I've seen graphs of U.S. cirrhosis of the liver death rates for the twentieth century. About 95% of cirrhosis of the liver cases are alcohol-related; within a few years of Prohibition's passage (remember that state bans preceeded national Prohibition by several years), death rates were cut in half; within a few years of Prohibition's repeal, death rates rose to the pre-Prohibition levels (see Figure 2). (See also this letter by a Yale professor to the New York Times confirming this.) Even those arguing against Prohibition admit this:While the U.S. death rate from cirrhosis of the liver (a consequence almost exclusively of alcoholism) dropped 50% during Prohibition (suggesting a 50% decline in alcohol consumption, it increased again to pre-Prohibition levels by the 1960s.
As the abstract points out, Barrow was an isolated community; this makes it practical for a ban to have a substantial impact. Barrow is also a community which is heavily Native American, and doubtless this aggravates the problems associated with alcohol.
I'm not a big fan of prohibiting either alcohol or drugs. But pretending that laws don't change behavior is, at best, naive. There can be destructive effects from prohibition that may be worse than the substance abuse problem itself, but pretending that these laws have no positive benefits is delusion.
Red's Trading Post
I've mentioned in the past the apparently bizarre efforts to turn really trivial errors on the firearms paperwork (neglecting to fill in the county when the city and county are the same name) into criminal matters for Red's Trading Post. They now have a blog to discuss their ongoing struggle with the federal government.
Fascinating, Long, Quite Technical Discussion of The Temperature Data Problem
Because ClimateAudit.org is still down (apparently a Denial of Service attack by global warming true believers), Steve McIntyre has a very long, detailed, and important essay at Watts Up With That? about the significance of the problems that NASA has now admitted with their temperature data. It is simply too long and careful to summarize simply, so I'll just excerpt a few paragraphs to encourage you to read it in full: There’s been quite a bit of publicity about Hansen’s Y2K error and the change in the U.S. leaderboard (by which 1934 is the new warmest U.S. year) in the right-wing blogosphere. In contrast, realclimate has dismissed it a triviality and the climate blogosphere is doing its best to ignore the matter entirely.My own view has been that matter is certainly not the triviality that Gavin Schmidt would have you believe, but neither is it any magic bullet. I think that the point is significant for reasons that have mostly eluded commentators on both sides.
I've been prepared to believe that most of the scientists involved in this work were pretty honest and serious in their pursuit of truth, and that the politician sorts at the IPCC were at fault. This last paragraph I quote above makes me more and more inclined to suspect that I have been too charitable.
...
The Hansen error is far from trivial at the level of individual stations. Grand Canyon was one of the stations previously discussed at climateaudit.org in connection with Tucson urban heat island. In this case, the Hansen error was about 0.5 deg C. Some discrepancies are 1 deg C or higher.
[graphs deleted]
GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the global averagel. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average, U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or later) stations in the GISS network (as shown below).
...
Now my original interest in GISS adjustments did not arise abstractly, but in the context of surface station quality. Climatological stations are supposed to meet a variety of quality standards, including the relatively undemanding requirement of being 100 feet (30 meters) from paved surfaces. Anthony Watts and volunteers of surfacestations.org have documented one defective site after another, including a weather station in a parking lot at the University of Arizona where MBH coauthor Malcolm Hughes is employed, shown below.
[picture deleted]
When you aren't prepared to share data or algorithms that form the basis of your published papers, it's usually because you know full well that others will rip your claims apart.
UPDATE: Over here is an animated GIF that claims to show the effects of this correction of NASA's U.S. temperature data. It isn't a huge difference--but you can easily see it--and from what I've read, about 50% of all the weather stations that supply the global temperature data used to prove global warming are the U.S. set. In addition, I found a very interesting comment that makes the following claim (which I don't know if it is correct or not):A paper / article written by Vincent R. Gray updated in 2003 said "Examination of the data shows that almost all of the 1901-1996 temperature rise for Russia/Soviet Union took place in one year, 1987 to 1988." This was about 3 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but two years after Perestroika and Glasnost.
The paper to which this commenter refers is here:
Gray says in another paper "Although some Russian stations have excellent records over a very long time, the service has deteriorated in recent years, together with the rest of the Russian economy. In 1988 there were 244 temperature stations, but in 1989 135 were closed; mainly the smaller ones, leaving only 109 stations. Most of the 91 5°x5° grids in Russia/Siberia in Figure 2 will be represented by single stations. Recent monthly records from Russian stations show many gaps and doubtful figures." In the same paper he notes "Monthly temperature records for the Russian stations show an extreme temperature range of around 60°C. Early measurements are likely to have been in primitive or deprived conditions. Stations would have been operated by political prisoners."
The papers (or articles) mentioned above can be found on www.john-daly.com. At one point on that same site I recall seeing an interesting hypothesis that temperature readings from Siberia pre-Soviet collapse should be suspect because officials had a strong economic incentive to report lower-than-actual temperatures: heating oil subsidies.
So here we have an interesting artifact in Russian / Soviet temperature data that presents itself as a discontinuity not unlike Steve McIntyre's "Y2K bug". In this case the discontinuity may have an economic driver behind it, not a mathematical error. Or the discontinuity may truly be due to climate change.A feature of the results is the large temperature increase in the former Imperial Russia/ Soviet Union (+1.23°C), more than double the change in Western Europe (+0.5°C) or the USA (+0.41°C). This large temperature rise in Russia/Siberia by so many stations that were regarded by Peterson et al (1999) as predominantly “rural”, casts doubt on their assumption that the effects of local heating in rural stations are negligible. Removal of the Russia/Siberia set from their analysis would surely show a significant urbanisation effect from cities in the rest of the world. This widespread local heating around surface measurement stations would explain the differences between the surface temperature record and temperature measurements in the lower troposphere by satellites., and so the major human influence on the climate.
If this Russian data is significantly wrong, it blows out a major component of the AGW claims about the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect not biasing the data of urban weather stations.
What Conservative American Journalist Wrote This?
It is an account that you won't see on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, or even Fox News:In October, 90 "incidents" were reported in Tameem, an area no larger than a few city blocks in Berlin. Twenty of those incidents involved attacks on US troops by gangs of insurgents. Wherever the Americans went they were shot at from apartment buildings, three times with rockets and four times with rocket-propelled grenades. Sixteen remote-controlled bombs exploded along the neighborhood's streets, 14 homemade explosive devices were found and defused, snipers attacked the occupying troops twice and one hidden car bomb was found, ready for use. And so the story continued: throughout November, December, January and February.
From the August 10, 2007 Der Spiegel.
By March, however, the number of incidents reported in Tameem had dropped to 43, including only four direct attacks with rifles and pistols and one rocket attack. There were no bombings, snipers, rocket-propelled grenades or car bombs. And the leaders of the region's 23 powerful clans were finally meeting with US commanders for "security conferences," while the imams from the city's mosques met with the military's chaplains.
The Iraqis in Ramadi, almost all Sunnis, had been worn down by chronic violence. Many had been victims of kidnappings or blackmail at the hands of mafia-like terrorist groups. They had finally come to the realization that, in the long run, the Americans were less of a threat and offered more hope than the fanatical holy warriors from Iraq and abroad.
Families began sending their sons to join the new Iraqi police force and military and fathers ran for municipal offices. They began cooperating with US military officials, turning in bombers and revealing their weapons caches, all while going about their daily lives, running their businesses, working as contractors, shipping agents and garbage collectors. Teachers returned to their classrooms, doctors began treating patients again and store owners restocked their shelves. Iraqis were now building the barbed wire barriers around the city, constructed to force travelers through checkpoints. Iraqis even manned the checkpoints as the Americans -- the Iraqis' former enemies -- retreated to the background, watching over as the city made a fresh start.
Since June, Ramadi residents have only known the war from televison. Indeed, US military officials at the Baghdad headquarters of Operation Iraqi Freedom often have trouble believing their eyes when they read the reports coming in from their units in Ramadi these days. Exploded car bombs: zero. Detonated roadside bombs: zero. Rocket fire: zero. Grenade fire: zero. Shots from rifles and pistols: zero. Weapons caches discovered: dozens. Terrorists arrested: many.
An Irritating Contraction
Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.
...
Lauer's unit arrives at the home of Ali Chudeir, a charming 30-year-old construction company manager in need of a good dentist. His English is good, but only, he says, because his father practically pounded five new vocabulary words into his head each day as a kid. Bodyguards armed with Kalashnikov rifles lurk around his front door. Chudeir still doesn't fully trust the newfound peace that has come to town. The terrorists, he warns, could return. They are still lurking outside the city, randomly attacking people, he says. "This will continue for a long time. That's why the Americans should stay here longer."
This Will Be An Amazing Resource For Historians
The rest of you may not much care! This came across one of the professional historian email lists, and I am so anxious to see this!State Papers Online, 1509-1714
Readers of this list should be aware that the archive of State Papers will be released from this coming October (2007).
State Papers Online, 1509-1714 (SPO) will be an essential tool for any historian who studies any aspect of early-modern British history and the relations of the Tudor and Stuart kingdoms with other states and countries in Europe and beyond. It has been produced by Thomson Learning - Gale with the guidance and advice of leading scholars in Britain and the United States.
SPO has as its foundation the State Papers, Domestic and Foreign, in The National Archives at Kew. It puts these alongside other collections that were originally in the state papers kept by the monarch's Principal Secretaries in the sixteenth century: at the British Library (principally the Lansdowne Manuscripts and some of the volumes of the Cotton Manuscripts)and in the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House, as well as the archive of the English Privy Council.
SPO will reproduce in facsimile each of the original manuscripts. Nearly two million digitized pages will be searchable from the modern printed Calendars. By overcoming the difficulty of matching an individual entry in a Calendar to a manuscript, SPO marks a huge advance for historians in all disciplines, whether they use it for their own research or for teaching.
Being able to view images of the manuscripts alongside entries in the Calendars will allow scholars not only to read any comments made by the recipients of documents but also to make their own notes, transcripts and corrections within SPO.
SPO has been designed for research historians, research-based teaching and students. Each phase of SPO will have introductory and explanatory essays, a glossary of terms, lists of abbreviations, and other helpful material. This is a project on an impressive scale. It will be quite the most important resource for historians of early-modern Britain for many years.
Built on the magnificent work of the Victorian archivists, it will bring into the light archives explored by most of us on microfilm in research libraries; from now on there will be few excuses for historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not to go to the original manuscripts of the most important collections of The National Archives and British Library. To have the State Paper archives put back together again, fully viewable and searchable from our own computers, is nothing short of revolutionary.
The first Part will be available in October, with the rest following within two years. The four parts will form one seamless searchable archive.
State Papers Online, 1509-1714
Part One: Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, 1509-1603: State Papers, Domestic
• The National Archives, London, State Papers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15, and Calendars;
• British Library, London, Burghley Papers (Lansdowne Manuscripts and some Cotton Manuscripts) and Catalogues;
• Hatfield House Library, Hertfordshire, Cecil Papers (Calendars and Transcriptions).
Part Two: Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, 1509-1603: State Papers Foreign, Ireland, Scotland, Borders and Acts of Privy Council.
• The National Archives, London, State Papers 49, 50,51, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 and 108, and Calendars;
• Acts of the Privy Council
Part Three: James I to Queen Anne, 1603-1714: State Papers, Domestic
• The National Archives, London, State Papers 8, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44 and 46, and Calendars
• British Library, London, Additional Manuscripts 64870-64924, 69868-69935, 69936-69998, and Catalogues.
Part Four: James I to Queen Anne, 1603-1714: State Papers Foreign and Ireland and Acts of Privy Council
• The National Archives, London, State Papers 47, 57, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108 and 112, and Calendars;
• Acts Privy Council
It Reminds Me Of A Horrible Ethnic Joke I Heard In The 1970s...
The one where the outhouse ends up with two TV antennas--for the [ethnic group deleted] who rented out the basement.
A group moves into a poor black section of town--and the existing inhabitants are concerned that the new group is bringing crime, lowering property values, and ruining their beautiful little community. From the August 10, 2007 Las Vegas CityLife:Nine group and transitional homes on one street and others scattered about the neighborhood. Recovering addicts, the mentally ill and ex-prisoners living next door to families and senior citizens. Schools in the area.
Loud music, fights and strange men walking the streets, talking to themselves. People passed out on sidewalks and in front and back yards. Burglaries, drug deals and shootings. Regular visits by cops, parole officers and paramedics.
No children playing in the street. It's like a ghost town, say the neighbors.
But the situation is more complicated than it seems.
The residents and owners of the group and transitional homes have their side of the story. We have nowhere else to go, they say. We have rights. We've made mistakes and we've been punished. Don't punish us again. Give us a chance.
We aren't committing the crimes; the neighbors are. We're helping improve the neighborhood. We're bringing it up.
...
No stucco palaces, manicured golf courses and desert walking trails here. Just single-story, cinder-block homes crouched along cracked sidewalks and streets. Burglar bars cover windows, sometimes to no avail. "No Trespassing" and "Beware of Dog" signs are stamped to front doors.
This neighborhood, located near Lake Mead and Martin Luther King boulevards in North Las Vegas, has a sense of sadness and isolation that only dirt lots, broken basketball goals and rusted porch chairs can convey.
But it's home to Flora Mason. Has been for 45 years. She raised four kids -- all of whom graduated from college, she says proudly -- in her home on Lawry Avenue. She has seen the neighborhood come up and go down too many times to count.
Shortly after she and the neighbors chased the gangs away a few years ago, she said, it started to go down again.
"I saw all these strange men walking up and down the street, early in the morning and late in the evening," said Mason, 78. "And they were mainly white. That's unusual in this neighborhood. Then I started asking questions. My next-door neighbor said, 'Those men are from the group homes.' I said, 'What group homes?' Then he told me there were a whole bunch of them up the street. That's how I found out."
Now Mason is surrounded by group and transitional homes. There's one next door. One across the street. And one three houses down.
"One morning I was out watering my lawn and I heard this loud noise," said Mason. "I thought it was a group of people coming down the street, because it was so loud. Then when I looked up, I saw that it was just one man. He was fighting and cussing at himself. I just threw down the hose and ran into the house."
And she has hardly come out since, she said.
"I feel surrounded. These group homes, that's all that's here. I don't have anybody to talk to. In the late afternoon and early evening, I used to go out there and sit in my front yard. That's why those chairs and that table is there. But I don't do that anymore. I stay in the house. I lock my doors and I don't dare come out."
Mason said she wouldn't mind two or three group and transitional homes in the neighborhood, as long as they were properly managed. But 12 or 13 homes is outrageous, she said. And many of them are overcrowded and poorly managed.
But there's a real issue here. Where do people like this live? What are the limits of private property rights, and of zoning authority?
Gun Rights Policy Conference in October
I'll be one of the speakers at the Gun Rights Policy Conference. I just finished making flight reservations. If you have media contacts in Cincinnati, I would love to do any radio or television programs in the area to promote my book.
One of Those Letters That Just Makes You Cry
I received this from a reader, Vicki, of these two Shotgun News articles, who gave me permission to share it:Hi, I just finished reading your article and couldn't [have] said it better, I am living this nightmare. I have a son that is 27 and schizophrenic and homeless at present. I have been going through all that you wrote about for 6 years and we are no closer to a solution now than we were 6 years ago.
The National Association on Mentally Ill (NAMI) is the organization for the mentally ill, family members, and friends who are trying to fix the serious problems related to this. Their local organizations provide support and encouragement for family members struggling with getting help for sick relatives, and for some people, this is a necessary and valuable capability. There's a limit to what the local organizations can do considering the state of the laws. Vicki's frustration is understandable. Don't let that frustration preclude you from contacting NAMI if you are in Vicki's shoes. You'll need all the supportive faces you can find, the longer you struggle to help a sick child.
There just is no help for families going through this. I stopped attending NAMI meetings because I am a realist and I want solutions not potlucks.When I vent to family members they tell me to write letters and publish them but Your article left no stone unturned. The problem is no one cares except families going through this.
Unfortunately, Vicki isn't too far off about this. For much of the American population, they do not realize the extent of the problem, and for the small fraction that are aware that there is a problem, they don't fully understand the nature of the problem--much less understand the conflicts and legal issues involved. My son at one time was found gravely disabled and held [for] 14 days when a public defender showed up and got him released the same afternoon. All I got were apologies from the hospital, they said that this happens all the time. My husband was on a business trip, so when my son (after being told not to come back to my house) arrived by taxi. I had to move out and live out of a suitcase until my husband got home.
Vicki lives in California; California Welfare and Institutions Code section 5150 provides for observational holds on a person that police or psychiatric professionals believe to be mentally ill and potentially dangerous to himself or to others. As I explained to Vicki, it isn't that the police don't care, but that as her experience when her son was hospitalized for observation (the "14 days" she mentions) demonstrated, there is a pretty vigorous effort by those who imagine themselves to be advocates for the mentally ill to make sure that no one is hospitalized, even temporarily, for evaluation.
The hardest thing about all this is I love my son and I hate that I fear him. He doesn't understand that and is repeatedly hurt over and over by me because he doesn't know that I am afraid of him. How does your mom deal with this?
I am trying so hard to keep my health in spite of this but it's real hard. It seems that we have only 2 choices: to turn our homes into mental institutions, and I know you know what that is like, and the alternative is to take our sick loved ones and kick them to the curb so they have to live like animals.
I constantly get citations in the mail for my son, the most recent was for $182.00 for sleeping on a beach. Kick him while he's down. When I've had to call the police to my house they tell me that it's not a crime to be mentally ill and can't get them to 5150 him, because they just don't want to do the paperwork, but they sure don't have any compassion for these mentally ill when they are trying to meet their quota. I want to know why families no longer have any rights. Don't I have a right to have a life? I'm exhausted, yet I meet families that have been going through this for 30, 40 years. Parenting normal children for the rest of your life would be exhausting. I have tried to live with him and I became a prisoner to my bedroom as he slowly took over my house. I have to constantly have my bedroom door locked. I live in constant fear in my own home.
I've given what advice I could. My brother's breakdown started when I was about 15, and while it was unpleasant and at times scary, I got through it without any permanent damage.
This has been so terrifying for me; you should see what it has done to my other son. He has so much anxiety. When this started he was 11; now he's 18 and he's an emotional wreck, and fears that he is going crazy. It's hell for siblings but for the parents it's forever, theres no light at the end of the tunnel. I live every day fearing his return, and I know that this is just a little calm before another storm. Thanks for reading, any advice form someone who knows what I'm talking about, would be appreciated. vicki
Many schizophrenics aren't scary. Those who do become violent, even if it is just property damage, create enormous fear in family and friends. Unfortunately, the problem that Vicki is going through is one shared by large numbers of parents across America. Some marriages do not survive the stress.
I've been planning to start annoying my legislators about the failures of our current system here in Idaho (and unfortunately, Idaho isn't unusual at all), but I've been waiting for a break in my current research project. It's time to turn my energies onto the Idaho legislature.
Too many lives are being destroyed.
