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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, August 18, 2007
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. 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. 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. Labels: Idaho politics 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. Labels: freedom of speech, homosexuality Friday, August 17, 2007
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?" 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. Labels: child sexual abuse 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. Labels: terrorism 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:
Now, I agree that a school can have a particular focus or purpose. There certainly comes a moment when a university can decide, "Our charter is to promote X; you are actively denigrating X; find somewhere else to work." But at least the way that this is described in these two accounts, it sounds like Paquin was simply trying to make sure that students understood all sides. Indeed, that's what Paquin said in the Rocky Mountain News article: 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. Labels: political correctness 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.) 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. Labels: constitutional history, due process, freedom of religion, intelligent design 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. 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. Thursday, August 16, 2007
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.) Labels: economics, foreign aid 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!  Labels: machining 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. Labels: machining 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 Families43rd 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. 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. Labels: Idaho politics 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. Labels: Idaho politics Wednesday, August 15, 2007
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: 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. Labels: immigration, terrorism 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. Labels: gun rights Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Athens, Alabama Considers Alcohol Ban From August 14, 2007 Associated Press:
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: 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. 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. Labels: gun rights 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. 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: 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. Labels: global warming 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. Labels: terrorism 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 Labels: history Monday, August 13, 2007
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. |
