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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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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Myths & Truths About Thanksgiving As with any holiday, there are a great many stories about Thanksgiving and its origins, not all of which are correct. I like a lot of what John Stossel does, but this story--which I have seen repeated over the years in substantially similar form--is just wrong: There are so many problems with this. What is generally considered the first Thanksgiving took place in the fall of 1621--not 1623, when the division of lands took place. There are two accounts of that first harvest feast (the Pilgrims would not have called it a Thanksgiving), one in Bradford's book Of Plimouth Plantation, and in Mourt's Relation. This gives the text of both. The claim about common versus individual property is incorrect. The lands were divided in 1623, but the common cattle were not divided until 1627. The implication in Stossel's article that all the settlers at Plymouth were Puritans of some sort is also wrong. Most were, but there were a number of what Bradford called "strangers," who were there for non-religious reasons. (The company that bankrolled Plymouth Colony did so for strictly commercial reasons.) Part of why the 1621 feast took place was that much of their population died over the 1620-1 winter, and they enjoyed the bounty that came from being taught appropriate agricultural techniques in the New World by friendly Indians. There are strong arguments for individual property ownership, but this isn't one of them. There is a desire in some circles to secularize Thanksgiving. Now, I agree that the harvest feast that the Pilgrims enjoyed in 1621 was part of a tradition of English agricultural celebrations, but this hardly renders it secular. The notion of thankfulness to God was deeply ingrained in the culture. Have a nice Thanksgiving. I don't expect to be posting much for the next day or two; I'm hoping that you are together with family and friends, enjoying the holiday, and not reading my blog! UPDATE: Taxprof has a collection of Thanksgiving proclamations over the centuries. The Corvette's Defroster Problem I alluded to this yesterday. Nothing is wrong with the blower motor. The problem (which the extended warranty will not cover) is that a mouse built a nest, filling the entire channel through which the air flows with paper. I'm guessing that having the windows open meant that a mouse crawled in and under the dash, and decided, "Here's a spot that ferocious cat of theirs can't get me!" Labels: cars Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Your Chance To Help Us Win The Supreme Court Case The following comes from Professor Joe Olson:
Labels: gun rights When the New York Times Runs An Article Like This... You know that the evidence is becoming overwhelming. From the November 18, 2007 New York Times: For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.As I have pointed out before, I am not comfortable with the death penalty. I'm not sure how certain we can be that it actually works as a deterrent. It is very expensive (at least partly because death penalty opponents have made it so). But it does seem that if it deters, then the occasional execution, done 15-20 years after the crime, is going to be far less effective than executions that are highly publicized, and happen often enough that a person considering murder will see them as at least a small possibility. One or two executions a year in an entire country are so remote a threat that a person considering murder has far more to be afraid of from his victim shooting back. Labels: capital punishment First Dusting of Snow Last Night At least, at our elevation. The sun came out, however, and melted it all away. The Corvette's heater blower motor seems to have given up the ghost--which really matters, because that's what makes the front defroster work. It's in the shop. Supreme Court Grants Cert The Court has granted writ of certiorari on the Heller case. This means that they are going to hear the District of Columbia's appeal. The question that everyone has to file briefs about is this: Whether the following provisions, D.C. Code §§ 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02, violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?Let's not get too arrogant, but I think we're going to win. Labels: gun rights Monday, November 19, 2007
MTV Suddenly Concerned About Earning Respect and Cultural Sensitivity Wow! MTV is suddenly concerned about making sure that they earn the respect of their viewers, and they are going to be sensitive to the morals of their audience. Just not in America. From the November 19, 2007 Seattle Times: It's unfortunate that they didn't share that same concern when they started running hip-hop videos that degraded women in this country. Oh yeah, Pimp My Ride is so out. Perhaps it will be Pimp My Camel instead. (And no, I won't tell the joke about what camels and Arab submarines have in common.) And to think that one of the first videos that put MTV on the map was The Clash's Rock the Casbah. I wonder if they'll be showing that! :-) Thanks to Michelle Malkin for pointing this out. Labels: Islamofascism Sunday, November 18, 2007
Fun With Fiberglass I mentioned Saturday's non-fun with fiberglass. My attempts to sand it smooth were less than successfull--the surface was just too uneven, especially with wads of fiber mat sticking up and out at all angles. Fortunately, I'm only out about $30 for materials--a small price to learn the importance of keeping the temperature warm enough for the resin to flow well. It turns out that the makers of Sonotube have introduced something called Sonotube Commercial that uses a plastic coating on the paper tube to make it more water resistant, and stronger. I have emailed the manufacturer to find out how much stiffer it is--and if there is a Boise distributor. My thought is that the standard Sonotube is so flexible that even fiberglassing it may not be sufficient. Perhaps starting with Sonotube Commercial (even if it is a bit heavier) might well be worth it. Perhaps it will be rigid enough that it doesn't need anything but a single layer of resin and some paint to meet my needs. UPDATE: I spoke to the technical sorts at the maker of Sonotube this morning. It turns out that the Sonotube that I grew up with--and that was widely used for making telescopes--is just about gone. What they now make is much thinner, and much flexible. It uses a coating called Rainguard to make it adequate for concrete pouring---but not so much for telescopes. I am not the first call that they have received. It turns out that the old style Sonotube (which only weighs 3.11 lbs./foot in the 20" diameter) is still made at the Lewiston, Idaho plant, largely because they don't have the paper and adhesives to make the new form. But no one closer than Bozeman, Montana, actually has it. It seems that it may make more sense to use the standard, not terribly stiff form of Sonotube, and fiberglass it--and do it correctly this time, at the right temperature! Labels: telescopes Murder and Madness I recently read Donald T. Lunde's Murder and Madness (San Francisco: San Francisco Book Co., 1976). Lunde at the time was a professor at Stanford--I'm guessing at the medical school. He seems to be in practice as a psychiatrist in Palm Springs now. The picture of him on his web site is a heck of a lot better than the one they used on the dust jacket of Murder and Madness! That picture makes him look too young to drive, much less be a professor--and he looked remarkably goofy. (I think he was just trying to look happy. I've had much worse pictures taken of me--although fortunately, never for a dust jacket!) Anyway, Murder and Madness seems to have been intended as a popular, mass market book. It is regrettably short of footnotes. However, for what I was using it for, it is just fine. Lunde ended up being called as an expert witness in three major mass murder cases in Santa Cruz--just after California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act went into effect. In all three cases, the murders were tragedies that could have been prevented. John Linley Frazier was one of the first examples of how California’s emerging concern for civil liberties of the mentally ill led to disaster. Like many other schizophrenics, the first clear evidence appeared when he was in his early 20s. He fixated on ecology, and after a traffic accident, became convinced that God had told him that he would die if he drove again—and gave him a mission to rid the Earth of those who were altering the natural environment. Frazier’s mother and wife recognized how seriously ill he was, and tried to obtain treatment for him, but he refused it. Frazier’s behavior became increasingly disturbed, and he warned that “some materialists might have to die” in the coming ecological revolution. The following Monday, Frazier climbed the hill from the cowshed where he was living near Santa Cruz, and murdered “Dr. Victor M. Ohta, his wife, their two young sons, and the doctor’s secretary.” He blindfolded them, tied them up, shot each of them, and threw them into the pool. Then he set fires throughout the house to return it back to the environment. Frazier’s bizarre behavior and statements to family and friends soon led to his arrest. He was found legally sane, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.[1] In other cases, there was not simply concern that the sufferer might be dangerous. Edmund Emil Kemper III was a sexual sadist who killed his paternal grandparents at age 15, in an attempt to punish his mother, who was having increasing difficulties handling him. California hospitalized him until he was 21, and then released him on parole in 1969. Over a bit less than a year, starting in May of 1972, Kemper shot, stab, and strangled eight women, including his mother. He dismembered his victims, had sex with their dead bodies, and engaged in cannibalism. After repeated phone calls to the police to persuade them that he was the killer, he was arrested, found legally sane, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.[2] Herbert William Mullin was another of the schizophrenics whose illness arrived just as California was moving towards a more humane and less restrictive approach to mental illness. In high school, Mullin showed some odd behaviors—more obviously frightening in retrospect—but until 1969, just before Mullin’s 22nd birthday, it was not obvious that he was mentally ill. Mullin were persuaded to voluntarily enter Mendocino State Hospital, on California’s north coast on March 30. Six weeks later, having refused to participate in treatment programs—and under no legal obligation to remain—he left. Mullin had trouble holding jobs. He would, as many schizophrenics do, refer to “hearing voices,” which understandably frightened employers, even at the menial jobs that Mullin was able to hold. In October of 1969, Mullin was again hospitalized, but this time against his will, to San Luis Obispo County’s psychiatric ward. A few weeks later, he was discharged “on the condition that [he] would continue to receive treatment at the Santa Cruz Community Mental Health Outpatient Clinic.” He did so—but then moved to Hawaii, where he again asked for mental illness treatment. Back he went to California, where his parents picked him up at San Francisco Airport. His behavior so scared them that within thirty miles of the airport, his parents stopped to call the Mountain View police department. Mullin was again hospitalized against his will at Santa Cruz General Hospital for a few weeks, and again discharged “less noisy and belligerent” than when he entered—but not well. Like many of the severely mentally ill, he lived in cheap hotel rooms in San Francisco, before moving back home with his parents in Santa Cruz in 1972. Mullin’s parents tried to find long-term hospitalization for their son, who was clearly dangerous to others. But California’s hospitals were busily emptying out—not looking to take new patients. In light of Mullin’s history of voluntarily entering, then leaving mental hospitals, it might not have mattered, without involuntary commitment. In four months of late 1972 and early 1973, Mullin murdered thirteen people in the Santa Cruz area. Why? To prevent the San Andreas fault from rupturing, and causing a catastrophic earthquake. Mullin had created an entire theology built around his belief that murder decreased natural disasters. Mullin was found legally sane (although both prosecution and defense agreed that he was seriously mentally ill), and guilty of ten murders.[3] Lunde blames Mullin's failure to receive treatment on Governor Reagan, with no apparent awareness that there were larger forces at work. This is not surprising; when this book was written, the full extent of the problem was not entirely understood. Lunde also argues that murder rates among the psychotic are comparable to the general population--an easy position to take when this book was written, since much of the published work on the subject was still being researched at the time. The first couple of chapters of Lunde's book provide a detailed examination of the realities of murder in the U.S., distinguishing it from the fictional portrayals. Lunde also seems inclined to blame murder on gun availability, which in light of the state of the research available at the time is an understandable position to have taken. To Lunde's credit, he points out that much of the very high rates of murder among young black men (a situation which has not substantially changed in the intervening three decades) is also related to the honor culture, primarily Southern in origin, so dominant in black ghetto culture then--and now. He certainly does a better job of recognizing the complexity of separating out the different factors than the average newspaper columnist today. Reading Lunde's book is something like opening a time capsule of 1970s thought. There's a lot here that is still accurate (regrettably so), and a lot where new research has let us move on. It is still interesting to see what a well-educated and well-intentioned person of that period could see--and that the idiots that run our governments today still can't see. [1] Donald T. Lunde, Murder and Madness (San Francisco: San Francisco Book Co., 1976), 49-52. [2] Lunde, Murder and Madness, 53-56. [3] Lunde, Murder and Madness, 63-81. Labels: deinstitutionalization Beowulf (2007) The new movie has something of the same relationship to the Anglo-Saxon poem that 300 had to classical history. The title is the same; most of the same characters are present--but let's just say that I would never have imagined Grendel's mother to look like this! Someone was clearly enamored of how 300, with its digitally created backdrops for live actors looked, and figured, what the heck, we have to create Grendel and other assorted non-existent critters digitally, why not do that with the people, too? My wife's reaction (after she got over the travesty that they made of the plot) was that the effect was too much like Shrek or Toy Story. The humans were better (technology marches on), but I'm not persuaded that it did anything for the movie. At least Shrek and Toy Story were comedies. This cartoonish effect for what is a combination of a horror story and a morality play just doesn't work. Another irritant to my wife (whose MA is in English Literature) is that the poem was apparently a pagan folktale that, because of the recent Christianization of the pagans, had been recast into a morality play of good and evil. What few references there are to Christianity in the movie are mild little snipes. But then again, you might argue that there's some merit to it. Beowulf was written on the cusp of the Christianization of pagan Scandinavia; this movie was written on the cusp of the de-Christianization of the West, so perhaps it all kind of fits. Why did they digitize all the people, and not just the monsters that needed special effects? Because had we seen Angelina Jolie truly as naked in film as she is in digital effects, it would not have been PG-13 (for violence), but R (for violence and frontal female nudity). I'm a bit disappointed. As an action adventure kind of tale, it wasn't too bad, and some of the special effects are pretty cool. But as my wife observed, on our way home, The Thirteenth Warrior told the story of Beowulf more accurately, and more appropriate to its chronological setting than the movie of Beowulf! And The Thirteenth Warrior was set several centuries later! Labels: movie reviews |
