The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
|
|
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).
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Hitler's Paganism There is a tendency in some circles to portray Hitler and the Nazis as some perversion of Christianity. It is certainly the case that the Nazis took advantage of an existing, religious anti-Semitism that was present in Europe--and added a new Social Darwinist layer of racial anti-Semitism. Suddenly, it was not enough to be a convert to Christianity--the Nazis were obsessed about the corrupting effects of "Jewish blood." It is also true that a fair number of Christians in Germany (both Protestant and Catholic) were seduced by the Nazi emphasis on family values, in opposition to the decadence of the Weimar Republic, which the Nazis characterized as the result of "Jewish cosmopolitanism." In private, the Nazis were hardly a family values bunch--and not just because of their propensity for violent attacks on their political enemies and on Jews. Ernst Roehm, head of the SA (Sturmabteilung) and most of his immediate subordinates in the SA were homosexuals. Hitler resolved an internal power struggle between the SA and the German Army by arresting and killing Roehm and most of his top leadership. This became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Part of what made it so easy to get the SA leadership with little resistance is that many of them were caught in flagrante delicto with each other. Naked men having sex are generally not in the best position to defend themselves. Hitler pretended to be shocked and horrified by this--but I very much doubt that this was really a surprise. There has been a long standing effort made to portray Hitler and the Nazis as devout Christians, for whom the Holocaust was simply a logical outgrowth of their Christian hatred of Jews. Yet most serious histories of the Third Reich acknowledge that Hitler held Christianity in considerable contempt, and that many of the SS leaders developed their own neopagan religion as an alternative to Christianity. I suspect that much of the misportrayal of Nazi religion comes from an effort to inoculate Jews in the United States from the longstanding and somewhat successful efforts to convert Jews to Christianity. As near as I can tell, my first ancestors in America named Cramer were converts from Judaism, as happened in large numbers in Germany in the nineteenth century. Anyway, I am reading Saul Friedlaender's Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1939-1945, The Years of Extermination. There is a very interesting quote on page 17, discussing the first few months of World War II: "We touch again upon religions issues," Goebbels noted on December 29. "The Fuehrer is profoundly religion but totally antichristian. He considere Christianity as a symptom of decline. Rightly so. It is a deposit [Ablagerung] of the Jewish race. One also notices it in the similarity of religious rituals. Both have no relation to animals and this will destroy them in the end."It appears that Ablagerung is a bit stronger than just "deposit": The process by which polluting material is precipitated from the atmosphere and accumulates in ecosystems.The reference to animals had me a bit confused at first, but then I recalled Romans chapter 1, and wondered if this is what Goebbels meant: For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. Labels: history ATVs My remarks earlier today about the first snow on the mountain tops brings back the recurring problem that the Corvette can't reliably get up our driveway--can't even reliably get up the private road that leads to our driveway--when we get six inches or more of snow. My wife's Equinox does just fine--and I don't think it even switches from front wheel drive to all wheel drive as it does so. (Although it is nice to know that it could if it needed to do so.) I've looked for several alternative strategies to giving up the Corvette. Yes, it's noisy, and the wife doesn't like to travel in for that reason. There are several all-wheel drive high performance sedans that, were I as rich as the billionaire Democrats who are trying to destroy America and capitalism, I would replace the Corvette with in a heartbeat. The new 2008 Cadillac CTS all-wheel drive sedan is attractive--but with an MSRP above $38,000 for the all-wheel drive version--that's a lot of money for those of us who aren't Marxists. (But it says a lot about how far Cadillac has come that they build a car that I wouldn't disdainfully throw out of my garage.) There is the MazdaSpeed 6, which has permanent four wheel drive to keep all that power sticking to dry pavement. The price is reasonable--a bit above $30,000, but there's no automatic available with it. The Subaru Impreza WRX five door at least has an automatic available, and it looks like it would be slightly cheaper than the Mazda. Still, I really don't want to give up the Corvette. When the top is off, and I'm driving down a two lane highway with the wind in my hair and sunlight filtering through the leaves, it is about as relaxing an experience as I can imagine. (And I am a hopeless cheapskate. You have no idea the internal struggle I went through to justify buying the Corvette.) I have considered buying a used 4x4--but my wife is terrified of me buying an unreliable car that leaves me stranded at the side of state highway 55 in a winter snowstorm. At least here in Idaho, there is a pretty hefty premium that any 4x4 carries because of the demand for them--and anything that meets my wife's standards is going to be $12,000 and up. So I have suddenly started toying with another idea. The state and county do a really good job of clearing Idaho 55 and the old highway that leads to the private road into our subdivision. I've never had a problem getting up either road in the Corvette. If we had conditions so severe that I couldn't get in or out on either road, most all-wheel drive sedans probably couldn't do it either. The problem is Sunburst Road and my driveway. So maybe, once winter snows start to fall with any regularity, I could just park the Corvette at the junction of Sunburst Road and the old highway--and drive an ATV up to the house. It is only about half a mile. It's a nice walk when it isn't 15 degrees outside, with blowing snow. The entire distance is private roads, so I could legally drive an ATV the entire distance, and just leave it under a tarp at the junction. New ATVs cost a bit of money--but used ones are surprisingly cheap. I don't need a very powerful one--I'm not going to exceed 15 mph on this road, and it just has to have enough power to climb the 15 degree driveway slope. Unlike a used 4x4 road vehicle, if a used ATV betrays me, the worst that happens is that I need to walk half a mile back to the house under unpleasant conditions. My impression is that ATVs are basically motorcycles with all four wheels driven by the engine. I am also guessing that at least some ATVs are two wheel drive only. Anything else that I need to know? First Snow We had a bit of rain last night--but since we are now a week into fall, on top of Bogus Basin ski resort, it is snow! (Forgive the image quality--I am still getting used to the tools available under Linux.)  Click to enlarge UPDATE: A few hours later--better sunlight, less clouds--but the snow is fading fast!  Click to enlarge Mental Illness Commitment & Firearms Disability What seems to be a very careful scholarly examination of mental illness commitment law with respect to firearms disability is Joseph R. Simpson,"Bad Risk? An Overview of Laws Prohibiting Possession of Firearms by Individuals With a History of Treatment for Mental Illness," Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law 35:3:330-338 (2007). The abstract: For nearly 40 years, federal law has barred certain individuals with a history of mental health treatment from purchasing, receiving, or possessing firearms. State laws are a patchwork of different regulations, some much more inclusive than the federal statute, others that parallel it closely. In some states, such laws are nonexistent. For the past 20 years, it has been possible to petition for relief from the federal prohibition; however, this is not the case with all state laws. The mechanisms for relief under state laws, when present, vary significantly, and not all require the input of a mental health professional or even of any physician. This article provides an overview of federal and state laws, a discussion of implications of these laws for mental health clinicians and forensic practitioners, and suggestions of directions for future research.He makes the claim: A front-page New York Times article in 2000 reported that of 75 so-called rampage killers (not all of whom had diagnosed or treated mental illnesses), 56 percent had made a fully legal purchase and another 16 percent had purchased the firearm by lying on their applications. Only 13 percent obtained the murder weapon by fully illegal means.2 However, beyond these anecdotal reports, there has been very little research in which the relationship between mental illness and risk of firearm-related violence, including suicide, was specifically examined.Because he says "firearm-related violence" he is probably correct. There has been a bit of research, as I have previous mentioned, concerning the relationship between mental illness and violent crimes. But this research has not directly looked at firearm-related violence. The article also discusses the case law related to firearms disability and mental illness commitment, pointing out what I have been saying regarding HR 2640--it takes a lote more (in New York State, just a bit more) than just a psychiatrist's say-so, or being given Ritalin as a child, to lose your right to own a gun under federal law: I was a little surprised at how few persons have been prohibited from buying guns under the mental disability provision: In the first 12 months during which background checks mandated by the Brady Act were performed (November 1998 to November 1999), more than 4,400,000 background checks were performed. Of these, 81,006 (1.8% of the total) resulted in denial of applications to purchase firearms. The majority of these denials (56,554, or 69.8 percent) were due to felony indictments or convictions, and a further 9.9 percent were due to misdemeanor domestic violence convictions. Only 70 individuals (0.1% of the denials) were denied because of a history of mental illness. In comparison, there were 3,072 (3.8%) denials for drug addiction.10And the reason seems to be what HR 2640 is trying to fix--lots of states won't supply the information. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Friday, September 28, 2007
The Hard Disk Idiocy Continues HP is getting faster...at shipping the wrong unit. Today, I received another hard disk drive. A reader pointed out that the wrong hard disk I received yesterday is an IDE 48 pin ribbon interface--not the SATA interface that was in my notebook. And today, I received another IDE 48 pin ribbon interface disk drive, again with part number 430328-001 on it. And guess what! The bad disk drive has the same part number on it: 430328-001. This means that HP has two parts that are completely different and incompatible with the same part number. He Was For It Before He Was Against It I'm afraid that all this sleazy activity by Senator Happy Feet has caused him to contract Kerryism. You remember John Kerry's famous "I voted for the war before I voted against it" statement? Let's see, Senator Happy Feet pleaded guilty to the disorderly conduct charge. Now he says that he did't do it, and wants to withdraw his plea. First he said he was going to resign from the Senate effective September 30, 2007. Now, according to September 27, 2007 FoxNews: Craig's lawyers asked a Minnesota judge Wednesday to let the three-term senator withdraw his guilty plea in a sex sting at a Minneapolis airport restroom. Afterward, Craig issued a statement saying he will stay in office "for now." Why do I keep thinking of the very funny 2004 campaign ad from Jerry Zucker (one of the writers of Airplane!) with the guy who keeps changing his mind--about which wire to cut on the bomb, which woman to marry--and especially the end, where Mr. Indecision starts to look at the clergyman who was about to perform the wedding with a lustful look in his eye? Labels: homosexuality, Idaho politics The Machine Shop As Membership Club Guy Kawasaki blogs about something that I would have found very useful a couple of years ago--and a co-worker and I actually discussed setting up a business like this: I'm not sure if there is a big enough market here in the Boise area to make something like this practical, but I am sure that in any urban area with a million people, this would make a lot of sense. If you have ever gone to a machine shop and and tried to get something made, you know that: 1. They charge you an arm and leg. 2. Machine shops are so busy that you may have a hard time getting them to even give you a quote. I think this is a cool idea, and if there was a critical mass of others here in the Boise area who agreed with me, it might be an interesting business opportunity. I suspect that to make this work, you would need to offer classes as well as equipment availability. I am convinced that the level of instruction required to keep club members safe and prevent them from stupidly breaking the equipment would not be terribly much. Thursday, September 27, 2007
More About Those Hard Disk Problems I mentioned several days ago that I had a hard disk failure on my HP Pavillion dv5220 notebook--and while waiting for the extended warranty process to solve my problem, I am using my Linux box. Today, the replacement hard disk arrived--a day earlier than I expected. But there was a problem. Here's the hard disk that was in the notebook:  Click to enlarge And the replacement hard disk:  Click to enlarge Hmmm. Do you see anything wrong? Well, I suppose if I used a hammer, I could smash the round pins on the replacement drive into the flat fingers of the connector, but I rather doubt that it would work very well. So I called technical support, figuring that perhaps some dv5220 notebooks used one connector type, and others used another type. Nope! They looked it up in their database, and this is the only type of drive they used! Perhaps there was some way to remove something from either drive that would be an adapter? Nope? Both drives had interfaces that were a part of the printed circuit board. The technical support guy found a picture online of the model that they sent me--part 430328-001. It sure looks like the drive that was in my notebook--but nothing like the drive they sent me--which was not only in a box that said, "430328-001" but had a sticker on the drive that claimed it was a 430328-001. Pretty obviously, someone put the wrong sticker on the drive, and in the wrong box. So, I'm sending this drive back, and hope that they get lucky the next time. Three things that have me very upset with HP customer support: 1. Their IT systems are obviously in a shambles. No two parts of the organization seem to have access to information that should be shared. I had to repeat my story, give them warranty information, product numbers, and serial numbers perhaps fifteen to twenty times over the last three days. 2. I know that India has cheap labor, and I also know that there is not a bright line that divides "speaks and understand English perfectly" and "utterly useless with English." But there needs to be some serious effort at identifying those people who can speak and understand English, and those for whom this is going to be a struggle. I speak with a California accent---not Southern, or Texan, or twangy Midwestern, or Bostonian, or even Wisconsin Cheesehead. This should be the least difficult version of American English for them to understand. And yet "four" and "seven" seem to be identical to many of the people I spoke to over the last few days. Some of them had so little accent that I was not at first sure if they were Indian or Canadian (who sound Canadian, but we still understood each other just fine), but most of the people on the phone required me to repeat myself, and vice versa. This is not pleasant, nor is it efficient. 3. I have not lost my temper or even reached the point of being short on the phone with anyone--in spite of strong temptations. Why? Because most of the people that I talked to seemed to be doing their best with completely inadequate IT systems. But at least two of the many people that I have spoken to in the last few days have been rude--and they started out the conversation that way. I know from talking to relatives who have spent far too much time on the phone to HP customer support that there area lot of rude people working for them. Why? Some company could gain a big competitive advantage in the computer market by advertising, "All customer support is provided from Canada, the U.S., and Britain." I know that I would be willing to pay 10% more for a computer, knowing that I wasn't going to be exasperated after trying to get customer support. UPDATE: A reader points out that someone has taken up the challenge. Gateway advertises: Now offering 100% North America-based telephone technical support.I think that alone is enough reason to consider a Gateway next time I have to buy a computer. The reader who informed of this recently made the decision to buy Gateways for a business that he works for instead of Dell or HP for that reason. Labels: globalization Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Utah's Concealed Weapon Permit Process According to this September 26, 2007 Associated Press article, Utah is no longer "shall-issue" for non-citizens: I really can't say that I blame them. I rather suspect that the criminal background check system for Afghanistan is a little less thorough than for Wyoming. I would also worry a bit about terrorists entering the United States and using the deficiencies (or active assistance) of their home country's criminal justice system to allow them to carry concealed. If the home country will provide adequate information, it appears that non-citizens can still get a Utah carry permit. Labels: concealed carry, gun rights Machining the Regular Hexagon Thanks to all my readers who found the problem with my previous geometry problem. Here's today's opportunity to exercise your brain. I need to be able to machine a regular hexagon. I've already decided that even using a template doesn't produce a sufficiently perfect hexagon. I have a tilting table for my mill that lets me put a rectangle (length = 1.156 width) at a 60 degree angle. But when the table tilts the rectangle, where do I position the cutting edge? The first diagram shows the rectangle as it is positioned in a mill vise on the tilt table in the 0 degree position. (The thickness of the tilt table turns out not to be relevant--only the distance from the pivot point to the edge of the rectangle.) It also shows the equations that I have persuaded myself identify the position of the first cut (C) relative to the pivot point.  The second diagram shows it in the 60 degree position.  Labels: machining Think Before Doing Something Irrevocable A San Antonio apartment complex has a policy against renting to people with lots of body piercings and tattoos. Not surprisingly, a couple that has been refused an apartment is screaming discrimination. From September 25, 2007 WOAI: It's against the law for landlords to discriminate based on the color of a person's skin. But can they reject you because of what's on your skin?Yup, it's discriminatory. And that's a problem because? "Discriminating" used to mean that you were somewhat demanding--that you didn't like everything, no matter how vulgar or repulsive. The evils of racial discrimination, and the campaign to end it, made the concept of "discriminating" suspect--even though almost everyone engages in discriminating behavior. I don't eat anything and everything that appears on supermarket shelves. I discriminate against animals because I don't treat the same way as people. I discriminate against rude and vulgar people because I find them irritating to be around. Democrats discriminate against Republicans at election time, and vice versa. I will tell you that my first reaction to people who have tattoos, especially those who have them everywhere, is, "Short-term thinker, are we? Have you thought about how ugly those tattoos are going to be in 30 years? Have you thought about how that tattoo on your breasts is going to look in 20 years, when gravity changes the aspect ratio of that design? Have you considered that instead of looking 'cool' in 20 years, those tattoos are going to make it difficult to get a job?" I am even more repulsed by a lot of the body modification stuff. I think the piercings everywhere are ridiculous, and mostly show that someone loves pain more than money, but what really repulses me are the "gauges"--when someone isn't content with an earring, but has to keep enlarging the hole until you can put a pencil through it. And then there are the extreme body modifications, with foreign objects under the skin, and the crowd that thinks that making themselves look at least somewhat like non-humans is so cool. A lot of the tattoos and piercing crowd claim that they are just "expressing themselves." Fine. We're just expressing ourselves when we refuse to hire people or rent to people who want to look like a freak show, or a New Guinea native from a the 1950s National Geographic. I have never known someone who went down the multiple piercings, tattoos all over path who felt good about themselves. It reminds me way too much of Michael Jackson's continual plastic surgery--an odyssey of pain for no purpose except to avoid confronting what is clearly a very damaged person. Reality Check For George Soros George Soros funded the California initiative (among others) that legalized marijuana for medicinal use. I voted for that initiative, because I thought that it wasn't such a big change--relatively few people would be so sick that marijuana would be the best choice. What has been surprising is how many people are now so sick that they need marijuana (snicker, snicker). One of the traditional libertarian arguments for repealing drug laws is that making something legal reduces the violence associated with trafficking. On the downside, there is a significant violence problem associated with reduced inhibitions caused by many drugs (including alcohol). California has, for practical purposes, made marijuana legal--but this September 26, 2007 Associated Press story shows that the trafficking-related violence is still going on: "Extensive"? Mr. Farrance's son must have been extremely sick. Labels: drug laws Transparency in Politics One of the big issues for good government reformer sorts has always been transparency: that you should be able to see who is funding what political groups. This isn't enough to make a system honest and fair, but at least if someone is using obscene wealth to manipulate the system, you should at least be able to see it, even if you can't prevent it. This editorial from the September 24, 2007 Investor's Business Daily points out that one of the biggest offenders on transparency is the hard left billionaire wing of the Democratic Party: For a long time, left-wing Democrats have insisted that corporate interests have hijacked politics in America with vast quantities of money. This is beginning to look like projection on their part. I don't have much confidence that it is possible to remove the money from politics--but I do think that it is only fair that when the billionaire leftists fund projects, that we find out about it immediately. Labels: global warming, immigration, terrorism Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The Space Aliens Are Sending Us A Message At least, if this was any other pattern carved into a cornfield, only visible from the air, and especially if it was in Britain, every kook for 300 miles would be showing up to explain its cosmic significance. From September 24, 2007 NBC channel 10: Back behind the towering corn is a message that can only be seen from the air.So, does it qualify as a hate message when almost no one knows that it was there? To recast this in medieval philosophy terms: "If a swastika falls in a cornfield, but there's no one there to be offended by it, does it mean anything?" Monday, September 24, 2007
Hard Disk Problems I'm glad that I bought the extended service plan on this refurbished HP notebook--the hard disk seems to be giving up the ghost. At least, when I boot it, I get a message that says, "SMART disk failure is imminent. Backup your files and replace the hard disk." Fortunately, I have my Linux box run an incremental backup every night of My Documents on the notebook, and my wife's desktop. Customer support is having me run the comprehensive disk diagnostic first. If it fails, they'll replace the hard disk. If it passes, they want me to do a restore operation (which really means that they think there's some virus in there that got past Norton). As you might expect, I may be a little slower responding to emails because of this! UPDATE: I am very disappointed with HP's customer support process. The guy I talked to last night indicated that they had no evidence that I had purchased the extended warranty. I was prepared to believe that perhaps I received the warranty paperwork, and failed to register it--but subsequent events suggest that HP's internal accounting processes are in bad shape. After a long conversation, last night's service tech passed me over to his boss (with spoke passable English and seemed to understand me), who managed to look up my extended warranty from the order number when I purchased it, and said that he was both registering the extended warranty for me. He told me that it would take four to 24 hours for this registration information to propagate throughout the system, but that he was explaining this in the case notes. He had me do a destructive restore (reformats the hard disk)--just to make sure it wasn't a virus. The hard disk diagnostic passes--but it still won't boot. He also said that he would call back between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM this morning to see if there was still a problem. This guy at least spoke clear English, and understood me. Anyway, no call back. So I called HP service--and they had no record that the extended warranty had been purchased, and nothing in the case notes to indicate that last night's technician had found proof of extended warranty. Worse, the guy this morning indicated that they could not find the order number at all! It wasn't a valid order number--even though it is on an email invoice from HP. This makes me wonder if I actually forgot to register the extended warranty, or if HP just lost the information. So I had to make some more calls--and fortunately, I found the extended warranty paperwork, so I had a certificate number. The department of HP that handles this seems to be stocked with Canadians, so they spoke English. Finally, they are sending out a replacement hard drive--although the guy in that department was almost incomprehensible, and it was apparent that he wasn't having any easier time understanding me. I don't think that seven and four sound anything alike. Machining Lessons: Forstner Bits vs. Drill Bits I've been using Forstner bits to hog out cylindrical holes in Delrin for some time. Usually I need a flat bottom hole that is 1.715" diameter and 2.05" deep. My 1 5/8" Forstner bit in the drill press makes a 1.620" diameter hole--and with a little care, the drill press is accurate enough on depth that if I making three pieces, I end up with one that is 2.049" deep, another that is 2.056", and the third might be 2.051". Then I put the workpiece onto the lathe, and use a boring tool to expand the hole diameter from 1.620" to 1.715". A boring tool is a very slow but very precise method of accomplishing this end--you certainly wouldn't want to use a boring tool to make the entire hole! One of the difficulties with using the drill press is that getting the Forstner bit exactly centered in the workpiece isn't easy. Consequently, I start out by putting the Forstner bit in the lathe to make a perfectly centered hole 3/10" deep. (A lathe is good for making perfectly centered holes; you have to work at it to make one that isn't perfectly centered.) Now, when I put the workpiece in the drill press, I just have to lower the Forstner bit into that hole, and adjust the mill vise to match. Now, here's the learning part. It turns out that Forstner bits, while they make a very precise circular hole, do most of their cutting at the edges of the bit, and very little at the front of the bit. (There is some cutting going on, but the close you to get to the center, apparently, the less force the blade exerts.) When you are using Forstner bits on wood, it doesn't much matter, because nearly all woods are so soft that the bit just goes right through. When you are using Forstner bits on Delrin, however, which is far, far harder than wood, you discover that a large diameter Forstner bit takes a long time to cut through a solid workpiece. On the drill press, I can make a 1 5/8" diameter by 2" deep hole in Delrin, but it takes several minutes. If I tried to do this on the lathe, where there is much less power, I am not even sure that I could do it. The trick to using a large diameter Forstner bit on Delrin is to start with a much smaller diameter bit. If I start with a 1/2" Forstner bit, it cuts down through Delrin very quickly. Then you move up to a 7/8" Forstner bit. This is mostly cutting at the edge of the hole--but there's a 1/2" void under the part of the bit that isn't doing much cutting anyway. This gradual enlargement of the diameter with progressively larger Forstner bits works well--but it is definitely a bit slow! So I started experimenting yesterday with using twist drills. (If you didn't know that there are different kinds of drill bits, a twist drill is probably the only kind of drill bit that you know about. To my surprise, the twist drill is very recent--patented in 1861.) Twist drills do effectively all their cutting on the front of the bit. Compared to a Forstner bit of the same diameter, a twist drill is much faster. There are some downsides to twist drills. They tend to be a bit less precise in where the hole ends up in your workpiece. This is why you always start with a pilot hole produced with a center drill. Because most twist drills are pointed, they don't produce a completely flat bottom--so you may want to follow them up with a Forstner bit. On the plus side, I discovered that where the lathe, because of its lack of power, required me to start with a 1/2" Forstner bit to have any hope of cutting a hole in a reasonable time in Delrin, I could put an 11/16" twist drill in the lathe, and cut through in about the same time. What this means is that in the future, instead of using Forstner bits sized 1/2", then 7/8", then 1 5/8" on the lathe, then use the 1 5/8" Forstner bit on the drill press, I will be able to use some of my twist drills so large that they look like props from the old TV series Land of the Giants on the drill press to hog out the hole, then switch to the 1 5/8" Forstner bit to finish the excavation. Labels: machining Another Black Columnist About the Jena 6 Erik Rush's World Net Daily column about the Jena 6 points out the manipulation going on by what he calls the "poverty pimps": The facts Sunday, September 23, 2007
John Edwards' Two Americas Last presidential election, Senator John Edwards spent a lot of time talking about the "two Americas": Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one: One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life.Yes, John Edwards would know a lot about the America "that reaps the reward... that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life." From the January 26, 2007 Carolina Journal: RALEIGH — Presidential candidate John Edwards and his family recently moved into what county tax officials say is the most valuable home in Orange County. The house, which includes a recreational building attached to the main living quarters, also is probably the largest in the county.Everyone needs a place to live. Unless you live in New York City, you need a car. I don't begrudge a person a nice place to live, if they can afford it. I also don't begrudge a person a nice car, if they can afford it. There is no clear dividing line between a necessary car and outrageous extravagance, or between an adequate house and a palace. But there are examples that are clearly the other side of that nebulous line--and when you spend much of your time delivering speeches about "Two Americas," while living like a Gilded Age robber baron, it is hard not to call John Edwards for what he is: a hypocrite. If, instead of a six million dollar house, Edwards had settled for a modest million dollar home, he could put that five million dollars into a scholarship fund. With even modest skill, it would generate $350,000 a year in income forever. That would pay for 70 college students to receive $5000 a year in financial aid--enough to allow at least 70 kids who might otherwise not be able to go to college, to do so. Or provide catastrophic health insurance for at least 72 people a year. As I pointed out a few weeks back, if 1000 of America's billionaire and multimillionaire progressives each put in $100 million (and many of them could do so without any serious injury to their lifestyle), we could get a good start on creating basic health insurance for those uninsured Americans who can't afford it. I've said it before, and I'm saying it again: the reason that America's wealthiest people support Democrats (Warren Buffett, for example, maxing his contributions to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) is not because they are concerned about the poor, but are too cheap to spend the money from their own bulging pockets--but are quite prepared to raise taxes on those of us who have to still work for a living. All this faux populism by billionaires seems to fool some people, but it sure isn't fooling me. Labels: health care, politicians behaving badly Marxian Reductionism Reductionism is what happens when a complex, multifactorial problem gets reduced to a single explanation. I mentioned a few weeks back Addicted to War, a ridiculous example of Marxian reductionism that, because it is so dishonest and inaccurate, is now a textbook in San Francisco public schools. Addicted to War is addicted to the reductionistic claim that every U.S. war was caused by capitalist greed. You can find reductionism in many different forms, of course. Marxists aren't the only ones that suffer this defect. Intellectuals (or at least people that assume that because they professors, that makes them intellectuals) seem to be especially prone to reductionism, perhaps because they are in love with ideas. A single explanation for everything is a very attractive idea. I went through a phase in my 20s and early 30s where libertarian reductionism was intellectually very satisfying. As I studied history more, I discovered that even when a particular libertarian explanation was generally right in explaining historical events, it was very, very seldom 100% right. (Maybe these claims were never 100% right, but I'm not sure of that, and I'm trying to avoid reductionistic thinking about reductionism.) Hence, the socialist idea that wars are always fought about capitalist greed was very popular in some circles at the start of the twentieth century. There were doubtless wars fought for that reason. But once this idea had grabbed hold of the brains of the intellectuals, everything had to fit that model: hence, Addicted to War. I'm reading Saul Friedlaender's Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume I, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, and he makes an interesting claim about the rather famous January 30, 1939 Reichstag speech by Adolf Hitler. Most people know of it for Hitler's insistence that the suffering of the Jews in Germany wasn't Germany's fault--he was ready to let the Western democracies that were complaining have all of Germany's Jews--but the Western democracies didn't want any more refugees. You can find that section of the speech quoted all over the Internet. Friedlaender's remark that caught my eye, however, was this: After referring to the American intervention against Germany during World War I, which, according to him, had been determined by purely capitalistic motives.... [p. 309]This was a pretty widely held belief in some circles in America by the mid-1930s, especially after the Nye Committee's report blamed (with little evidence) U.S. intervention into World War I on American munition makers trying to protect their investments in loans to the British government. Too bad for Senator Nye (R-ND)--he moved from trying to blame U.S. involvement on munitions makers to trying to blame President Wilson (a Democrat) for misleading Congress about the reasons for the war--and as this February 10, 1936 Time magazine article points out, the Democratic majority eliminated the Nye Committee's funding. (This seems to be an executive summary of the Nye Committee report--not very persuasive.) I've tried to find the exact language that Hitler used in that speech--but I can't seem to find the full text of it anywhere. It would be amusing (although perhaps not terribly useful or significant) to see the exact language that Hitler used, and see how similar it is to Addicted to War's claims. Labels: history Lube, Oil, Filter, and a Mouse, Please I took the Corvette in for an oil change at Wal-Mart, dropped it off--and then picked it up a couple of hours later. The service writer informed that when they opened the hood, they had a little surprise waiting for them--a snake curled around the warmth of the engine. And yes, it was still alive, and no, they decided that checking all the vital fluids did not include removing the snake. I can't claim that I'm surprised. There are enough field mice that our cat Tater catches in the garage that I am not surprised that a snake would scurry in there as well. Now that the weather has cooled off (from summer heat to surprisingly cool fall days right on the autumnal equinox), I suspect that my hitchhiker curled up in the nice warm engine compartment some evening after I pulled into the garage. I told my wife, and she insisted that we go out and take a look for the snake under the hood. By then, several hours had elapsed. Perhaps he left in pursuit of a less terrifying warm place to sleep; perhaps fell off as I was driving home. Labels: cars |
