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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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, November 10, 2007
The Limits of Free Speech Where's the ACLU? The free speech that has been banned is offensive, no question, but doesn't actually cross the line into a direct threat or incitement to violence (although I can see how it might be read that way). From November 9, 2007 Associated Press: PHILADELPHIA - A federal judge ordered an anti-abortion activist to remove Web site postings that authorities said exhorted readers to kill an abortion provider by shooting her in the head.There's no question in my mind that something like this is outside of the protections of the First Amendment. But then again, so are the North American Man-Boy Love Association's publications that tell adult men how to have sex with little boys and get away with it--and yet the ACLU is defending NAMBLA in a civil suit filed by the parents of a child who was raped and murdered by a NAMBLA member. As with so many matters, the ACLU's ahistorical understanding of the First Amendment is really just an exercise in seeing what they can do to help adults get access to minors for sex. Labels: abortion, freedom of speech, homosexuality Friday, November 09, 2007
Reading Level There's a new website that analyzes the reading level of various blogs.  So, if you think that you are a pretty smart person, and enjoy this blog, there's a reason! A Picture Your Local Newspaper Isn't Going To Show Muslims and Christians, coming together, to restore a church to operation. Where was this? In Iraq--and what it says about how well things are going there--is why you aren't going to see it: A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Infantry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.  Michael Yon, the photographer, has authorized a limited, no-fee use of it by the media. Email him for details. Labels: terrorism Family Task Force I'm sure that a lot of people in other parts of America probably are scratching their heads about a news story like this one. From the November 9, 2007 Idaho Statesman: Rep. Steven Thayn and his wife, Sherry, raised eight children on their family farm. She stayed home, and they home-schooled several of their children before eventually sending them to local schools.Unsurprisingly, Democrats are just horrified at the concept of trying to help families. What drives me really crazy about this is the unwillingness to face some unpleasant facts. 1. There's no question in my mind that a society is better off when kids, especially small children, are being raised by their own parents. Traditionally, this has been the mother, but as far as I am concerned, if Dad wants to stay home and raise kids instead, that's fine. I know that a lot of daycare providers mean well, and some of them probably do a great job. But realistically, lots of daycare providers do it because they couldn't get any other job. And this is who is raising the next generation? When we lived in Rohnert Park, we had a neighbor that did daycare. She was a high school dropout. She was a very nice person. But she was poorly educated, and the environment was not something that was going to do much for the kids who she watched compared to being raised by their own, middle class and above mothers. She finally stopped doing daycare because of one child in particular that she started watching at six weeks (which is how long unemployment insurance pays new moms to stay home). Mom and Dad had important jobs down in San Francisco, and drove shiny new BMWs. Mom dropped off her son at about 6:00 AM, and didn't arrive to pick up her son until after 6:30 PM. Dad asked the daycare provider not to let Mom know when her son started walking or talking--so that Mom would think that this happened when Mom was home. By the time the son was two years old, he would only call the daycare provider, "Mom" and would literally attack his biological mother when she came to pick him up. Why did this couple decide to have children? 2. Back in the 1960s, while most mothers were staying home, raising their own kids, there were some who didn't have that choice. Not every father was making enough money, and even then, there were fathers who flaked out, or drank their paychecks. But over all, most families managed to operate in something similar to the idealized Ozzie and Harriet fashion. What happened when the feminists started telling women that they weren't "fulfilled" if they didn't have high powered careers? Lots of women went out, joined the workforce, and in the process, almost doubled the fraction of workers. What happens when you dramatically expand the number of workers? It drives down wages. As long as just a few mothers were out working, it didn't make a big difference. But as the number of working mothers rose higher and higher, the wages of all workers had to fall to compensate--and what used to be a choice that some mothers could make, became something that most mothers had to do. 3. This problem is more severe among the poorest parts of our society for a simple reason: a couple where both of them are making $60,000 a year can, with a little effort, cut their expenses back to a point where Mom can stay home, at least for the first few years of childrearing, or at least work part time. When Mom and Dad are both bringing in $25,000 a year, there's a limit to what can be cut back. An HIV Vaccine Study Raises A Question For Me This article from the November 8, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle tells of an HIV vaccine study that not only didn't work--it may have increased risk for the study group: Evidence is building that an experimental AIDS vaccine given to 1,500 volunteers not only failed to protect those who received it, but may have put some of them at higher risk of contracting HIV than those who were given a placebo.Now, there are diseases out there for which a vaccine seems like a darn good idea, especially diseases that are hard to prevent. For example, it is difficult, short of becoming a hermit, to avoid catching the flu, or a cold, or polio. These are all easily communicable diseases. But AIDS? Take the following precautions, and your chances of catching AIDS now are effectively zero: 1. Do not share needles with others. 2. Do not engage in unprotected sex with someone unless you are sure of their HIV status. (Yes, that means that you may have to find out their name first, and delay sex until your third, fourth, or even fifth meeting.) 3. Change your sexual partners less often than you refinance your house or replace your car. There are still going to be a small number of people that are going to follow all the rules, and still get infected. But this is a trivial number of people--perhaps a few hundred a year in the whole country at first, dropping down to tens a year as the number of new infections declines. Does it really make sense to devote any substantial resources to finding a vaccine for a disease that you can't easily contract without being beyond stupid? And especially when the vaccine turns out to be more dangerous than a placebo? I know, I know, I'm going to get a bunch of nasty remarks about how homosexuals don't have the option of following rules 1, 2, and 3, because they can't get married. Sorry, I don't buy that. You don't need a marriage certificate to be monogamous, or at least to be careful in your promiscuity. Would I be upset if enormous resources were being spent on developing a herpes vaccine? Or an HPV vaccine? Or a syphilis vaccine? Yes, and for the same reason. These aren't diseases that just "happen." They are the result of people engaging in relatively risky behaviors. It would be like spending billions of dollars to develop drugs that prevent smoking from causing cancer. Labels: homosexuality, STDs Those Liberal, Openminded Swedes I read this article in the November 8, 2007 Der Spiegel (one of the big German newspapers) and I found myself wondering if the Internet had suddenly developed a wormhole into a parallel universe: Sweden has drastically reduced human trafficking and prostitution by imposing a ban on the purchase of sexual services, the first of its kind worldwide. But many sex workers argue the ban robs them of their livelihood and makes them more vulnerable to violence.The rest of the article goes on to say that there has been a dramatic reduction in prostitution in Sweden, as well as a reduction in the human trafficking related offenses (in which often Third World women are effectively bought and sold as slaves). Would you have believed that the day would come when you would see the left end of any European country decide that prostitution needed to be crushed out of existence by law? Labels: prostitution Thursday, November 08, 2007
Firepower, Then and Now During the debate at Houston Community College, Professor Rakove a couple of times made the claim that the Second Amendment is obsolete because it is "about the militia" which is pretty well gone, and also claimed that firearms technology has advanced so much that what might have made sense then didn't make sense now. In particular, he claimed that one person with an assault weapon has as much firepower as a company of soldiers in the 18th century. This didn't sound quite right, but I settled for pointing out that "assault printing presses" are capable of printing hundreds of thousands of pages an hour today--perhaps freedom of the press is obsolete. The Internet and modern telecommunications, perhaps, make traditional warrant requirements obsolete, too, by the same reasoning. If I had been feeling really cheeky, I might have suggested that in the era of suicide bombers, that "cruel and unusual punishment" provision might not make sense anymore--that perhaps we need the ability to inflict suffering on convicted terrorists that keeps them alive, and in excruciating pain, for many years as a discouragement to terrorist acts. But the more I thought about the claim about a single person having the firepower of a company, the more clearly wrong it was. With a 30 round magazine in say, an AR-15 or an AK-47, you can realistically expect to make 30 aimed shots in about 40 seconds. (Yes, you can fire all 30 shots in about 10-12 seconds, but they are going to go everywhere, and only in rather remarkable circumstances will most of those shots kill anyone.) That's about 45 shots per minutes, assuming that you can change magazines quickly. A trained soldier in the 18th century was supposed to be capable of firing about three shots per minute with a musket. That means that a person with an AR-15 or AK-47 can put out about 15 times as many aimed shots per minute as an 18th century soldier. That's certainly a step up, but not equivalent to a company of soldiers--more like 1 1/2 squads of soldiers. It's an order of magnitude improvement. Admittedly, the weapons have more range and are somewhat more accurate. (And I do mean that. Two minute of arc accuracy--getting all your bullets in a 2" circle at 100 yards--was relatively common for riflemen.) Compensating for that is the dramatically improved quality of medical care. Any abdominal wound back then was likely to be fatal because of peritonitis. The presence of city police forces who can respond to a criminal is an improvement over 1791, and the same improvements in technology that benefit a beserker with a gun also benefits those who are defending themselves. By comparison, the "technological change renders this clause obsolete" argument can be applied like this: 1. A printing press putting out libelous statements about the government, or an individual, or obscene materials, in 1791 would have printed perhaps 4 pages per minute. A modern newspaper printing press prints thousands of pages per minute--so call it three orders of magnitude more potential damage. 2. Because of the limited size of American cities, the most that a newspaper of 1791 could have influenced with its partisan and dishonest reporting would have been about 10,000 people in a day (and usually much less). NBC News has tens of millions of viewers every evening; it is thus capable of spreading three orders of magnitude more lies than any American newspaper. 3. The most destructive individual weapon system of the 18th century was a warship, which could, conceivably, cause hundreds of deaths if it attacked a major port like New York City. The most destructive individual weapon system of today against which we have to defend ourselves as a society would be a nuclear weapon, which would likely cause at least a hundred thousand deaths from direct effects, and radiation aftereffects. This is at least three, and perhaps four orders of magnitude more severe of a threat to American society. By the same reasoning, if the technological advancements of firearms justify calling the Second Amendment obsolete, the protections against unreasonable search and seizure are far more obsolete. Oh, and for the same reason--to find out if such a weapon has been smuggled in--the 24 nightmare--not just waterboarding, but techniques that everyone recognizes as torture could be justified by Rakove's logic. UPDATE: It occurs to me that the same is still true with handguns. I handled Paul Revere's pocket pistol some years ago. It was very compact--not much bigger than the Colt Mustang that I usually carry. True, it was only a single shot, while my Mustang holds six rounds. Still, people in 1791 America who were expecting trouble carried two, four, or even six pistols in their belt. (And there were multibarrel handguns at the time, known as pepperboxes, which were not as reliable as single shot pistols.) My guess is that I could probably get about three times as many bullets on target in the same time with the Mustang as carrying six single shot pistols. Carrying a couple of spare magazines for the Mustang would take me up to about eight times as many bullets on target in the same length of time. A high capacity 9mm handgun takes us up a bit higher--perhaps as much as 20 times as many bullets on target per period of time as single shot pistols. Still, this is an order of magnitude difference in capability--not multiple orders of magnitude. Similarly, a modern handgun is more powerful than a single shot pistol of 1791--but until you get up to .357 Magnum, the difference in power isn't more than an order of magnitude. Accuracy is improved, especially because British-made pistols and many American-made pistols were smoothbores, but we aren't talking an order of magnitude. I would feel about as endangered by a 1791 single shot pistol at ten yards as I would by a modern handgun at twenty-five yards--a distance where a competent shot making a serious effort stands an excellent chance of hitting the target. Labels: gun history More Fake Hate Crimes From November 8, 2007 WTNH channel 8: Windsor (AP)_ Windsor police say a student who reported a racial slur scrawled on a door at the Loomis Chaffee boarding school last month has agreed to leave after admitting she wrote it herself. Labels: fake hate crimes Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Alcee Hastings as a Voice of Reason Alcee Hastings used to be a federal judge. He was impeached for soliciting bribes from corrupt union officials who had looted the pension fund, and the Senate removed him--the evidence was not sufficient for a criminal conviction, but there was no question that he was completely and utterly corrupt. Not surprisingly, he was then elected to Congress, because Democrats in some parts of the country are quite prepared to believe bizarre claims about a vast conspiracy to "get" him because he was black. And yet, Hastings is one of the more reasonable voices left in the Democratic Party! Dennis Kucinich (D-Space Alien Land) introduced an impeachment resolution in the House of Dick Cheney. Alcee Hastings' response? Hastings told Fox News: “Dennis Kucinich is on a quest of his own. He sees flying saucers and he acts like one, too.”As one of the commenters over at DonSurber.com points out: Now, the only question is whether the Republican Party has enough people of principle and intelligence left to defeat a party increasingly dominated by Kucinich and those who are not that rational. Labels: politicians behaving badly Tuesday, November 06, 2007
The Debate Will Not Be Televised! Professor Rakove objected to our debate being filmed, so there's no video to show you. You will have to take my word for it--it was awesome! At the end, a shaft of sunlight shown around me, lighting up my halo, while Professor Rakove? You may imagine how glad the queen was when she heard the name. And when soon afterwards the little man came in, and asked, now, mistress queen, what is my name, at first she said, is your name Conrad? No. Is your name Harry? No. Perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?Oh? You don't believe that's how it went? Well, I wish there was some video, then you would know that this is 100% the truth! More seriously, I was disappointed that there will be no video of these three debates. We had a useful crowd of about 45 people, mostly students, and I think both of us managed to get the points across that we wanted. Labels: gun history The Power of One Eric Scheie over at Classical Values talks about why Thompson isn't going to get the religious conservative vote, because of his reluctance to pass an amendment defining marriage as one man, one woman, or to prohibit abortion. Thompson, of course, wants judges to do their job--which isn't finding a right to same-sex marriage or abortion hiding inside the Fourteenth Amendment. I know that there are religious conservatives who aren't happy with Thompson for these reasons. But my view on this very simple. Freedom of state governments to make their own decisions (unless clearly contrary to the state or federal constitution) is a fundamental conservative principle. Sometimes the results are unfortunate (Oregon's euthanasia law, California's medical marijuana law). But I would rather have 50 states making their own decisions, even if the results are sometimes flawed or stupid, than have the federal government impose its will. A government strong enough to impose one morality is strong enough to impose one immorality. Or to put in more direct terms: a federal government with authority to prohibit the state legislatures from recognizing same-sex marriage also has authority to require state legislatures to recognize same-sex marriage. A federal government with authority to ban abortion in every state also has authority to require every state to allow and fund abortion. If we reach the point where 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the states are prepared to amend the Constitution, fine, we can talk. But any religious conservative who thinks that we are even close to that level of unanimity needs to get out more. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Another Fake Hate Crime Apparently, one George Washington University student was drawing swastikas on dorm room doors--and was punished for it. But another one turned out to be drawing swastikas on her own dorm room door, and claiming to be a victim. From November 6, 2007 Washington, DC Fox channel 5: WASHINGTON (AP) -- Officials at George Washington University say a student who complained of swastikas being drawn on a dorm room door has admitted responsibility for them. Labels: fake hate crimes Monday, November 05, 2007
In Houston I had dinner with the Houston Community College History Department chair, and even though her specialization is modern Middle Eastern history, she also teaches the American history survey classes, so we have a very entertaining conversation. We ate a very upscale Tex-Mex place called Hugo's, run by a former student--one of those success stories of the guy who started out in the kitchen of one Mexican restaurant, and worked his way up. Different Mexican restaurants have slightly different notions of carnitas. This is the thoroughly cooked, not so spicy variant. I like both forms of carnitas--they're just different, probably reflecting regional differences. The college put me in a Hilton--which is as nice of a hotel as I think I have ever stayed in. (Not nicer than any that I have ever stayed in, but comparable to the places that NRA lodged me Lansing, Michigan and Columbus, Ohio a few years ago.) It is November--and it was still unpleasantly hot and sticky when I arrived. But alas, the outdoor pool was still too cold for my delicate body by the time I headed down there. Here's a picture from my room.  Click to enlarge The exposure was a bit long--hence those streaks are headlights, not the high energy particles used to accelerate Houstonian ground vehicles up to light speed. At Denver International Airport One thing that has been nice is that Boise Airport and Denver International Airport now have free wifi, so I can check my email, blog a little (as you can see from the previous posting), and get a little bit of work done. One frustration that I had forgotten from my last trip with my notebook is that I can't easily use Thunderbird to send email. If my memory is correct, the free wifi services block SMTP port access to prevent spammers from misusing the service. This means that I can only easily send emails from the webmail interface at my ISP. That's okay, but not as nice as just hitting reply. I see that there are services out there with names like smtp.com that, at first glance, provide a way around this problem--for a price. If I traveled a lot, this might make some sense. For the amount that I travel, it doesn't. Too Much Play for Astrophotography? I have had a couple of ScopeRoller customers who have complained that the Deluxe wheel set has too much play for astrophotography. One of my customers sent a picture of of his scope mounted on ScopeRoller Deluxe casters--and some long exposure astrophotos he took--more than two hours. You tell me: are these good enough? Labels: astrophotography, telescopes Sunday, November 04, 2007
Plagiarism Plagiarism isn't the worst sin in the academic world, fraud is. Plagiarism is stealing something valuable; fraud is selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Still, as this October 8, 2007 Inside Higher Education article points out, students are now calling professors on plagiarism, instead of the other way around. From the October 4, 2007 Yale Daily News: Several passages in Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres’ ’81 LAW ‘86 newest book are unattributed verbatim reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of passages from various newspaper and magazine articles published in the last twenty years, an investigation by the News has shown.That Ayres is one of the academic community's gun banners just makes it sweeter. Labels: academic integrity World's Smallest Violin James Taranto linked to this item from the October 25, 2007 Buffalo News under the category of "World's smallest violin." If you don't know what that refers to, the full phrase is, "That the world's smallest violin playing hearts and flowers for you." Jackalope Pursuivant (who, like yours truly and the author of the whine, has a history degree), has a very funny line by line analysis of what this guy did wrong: I have held four good jobs in the field of history since I graduated. I've been offered interviews for others. For love, I left a decent, promotable, $40,000 a year job in DC. Alternately, I could even now have a great time splitting my time between two national parks in the Northwest. Or, I could be an Army historian in Illinois. Or an NPS fee program manager in northern Arizona. All good historical jobs.I actually am very sympathetic to this guy's student debt situation. It is amazing how rapidly the money accumulates--but I do agree with Jackalope Pursuivant: this guy didn't think about the rationality of going to a very expensive private school to get a degree that, under the best of conditions, isn't going to lead to a high paying job. There is, I think, a good argument for universities doing a bit more to discourage degrees in fields where aren't many jobs. History degree? I enjoyed getting one, but I didn't go into debt to get one. There are degrees out there that do lead to high-paying jobs--and surprise, surprise, they pay well not because of some deep dark conspiracy against liberal arts, but because computer science, electrical engineering, and civil engineering are all fields where you are producing something that the masses want or need. |
